Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible! Read online

  Eve would often ponder how one minute she was not there or anywhere, and now she was. Adam would ponder nothing. When she closed her eyes at night, Eve knew that the blackness was all things at once. In her dreams she danced in the tops of trees. Her beautiful thoughts flew out her ears and lit up the sky like fireflies, and there were all kinds of people to talk to and hug. And then she would hear snoring. She would wake up, and there would be Adam, his yokel face pressed right against hers, his dog food breath blowing right up her nostrils.

  Eve stared up at the sky. Adam draped his arm across her chest, and brought his knee up onto her stomach. God, watching in Heaven, must have feared for Adam’s broken heart as though the whole universe depended on it.

  Adam was close to the animals and spent all day talking to them. Except for God, Eve had no one.

  She would complain to the Lord any chance she got.

  “Adam is a nimrod,” she would say, and the Lord would remain silent.

  God was the best and all that, and she loved the hell out of him, but when it came to trash talk, he was of no use.

  Adam was constantly trying to impress her.

  “Look what I have made,” he said one bright morning, his hands cupped together.

  Eve looked into his hands then she pulled away and shrieked. Adam was holding giraffe feces.

  “I’ve sculpted it,” said Adam. “It is for the Lord.”

  He opened his smelly hands wide to reveal to her a tiny little giraffe with a crooked neck.

  On some days, Adam galloped about exploring. His hair was wiry and when it got sweaty it hung in his eyes. Adam was cute this way. On one such day, he saw a snake. Adam made the snake’s acquaintance by accidentally stepping on his back.

  “Boy, that smarts,” said the snake, smiling through the mind-numbing pain.

  Adam lifted him from off the ground and brought him up to his face to see him better.

  Their eyes locked, and in that very moment the snake concluded that, indeed, Adam was an oaf, and that as king of the Earth, his reign would very soon end. There was a new sheriff in town and it was he. It was no longer the story of Adam, but the story of the snake. He could tell all of this just by simply looking into the man’s idiot eyes.

  “I have seen you with another like you,” he said to Adam, “but instead of the dead snake between the legs, she has chaos there.”

  “That’s Eve,” said Adam, all animated. “I named her that myself. God made her from out of my rib.”

  He showed the snake the scar on his side.

  The snake looked at Adam in silence. The idea of Adam—Adam the schlemiel, Adam the fool—being God’s favorite, was enough to give the snake a migraine.

  “You aren’t at all like I imagined,” the snake said. “I thought you’d be closer to the ground . . . more pliant— greener. I tried to explain to God that to make you balanced up on your hind legs was architecturally unsound. I don’t know why I bother.”

  Adam sat and listened wide-eyed. Eve hadn’t the patience to sit and chat like this, so when the snake suggested they get into the habit of meeting every once in a while to talk, Adam was very excited to do so.

  As they lazed on their backs staring up at the sky, the snake would brag about how he was older than the whole world and that he used to pal around with God in the dark, back before creation. He said that in the darkness, it was a truer, freer time, that in the darkness was the good old days. He told Adam that back in the very beginning, he had all kinds of thoughts on how to make the Garden of Eden a better place, but that God was just too stubborn to listen to reason.

  “ ‘Make the earth out of sugar,’ I told him. ‘Instead of stingers, give bees lips they can kiss you with.’ ”

  The snake had opinions about everything. Often, he complained about the other animals. “The hyenas stole my pecans,” he said. “The squirrels don’t respect me. A zebra tried to kill me!”

  Adam didn’t always agree with the snake—in fact a lot of what he said went straight over his head—but there was still something about him that made him get into a very particular mood. He made the world feel bigger. Sometimes when Adam was with Eve, sitting there in icy silence, he would think to himself, “I sure could go for a good dose of snake.”

  Adam really loosened up with him, too, which made it all the more sad to watch the snake’s duplicity. You would think that after all the time they spent together, the snake would find it within himself to start liking Adam, just a little bit, but instead, he only grew to hate him more.

  He took to comforting himself with thoughts of Adam’s wife, Eve. From what he heard from Adam, she was, as well as being hot, very smart. Often, he would imagine running into her and the instant synergy they would have.

  “Adam neglected to tell me how leggy you are,” he would say, wrapping himself around her calf.

  The snake had no idea what he looked like. He was hairless, bucktoothed, four inches tall, and he spoke with a lisp. Adam had the IQ of a coconut husk, but he was still human. The snake, in his arrogance, was unable to grasp this, and so he daydreamed.

  “Sometimes I’d think you were watching me,” the snake imagined saying to Eve. “Because I felt like there were ribbons wrapped around me. I would turn around to catch you sneaking a peek from behind a tree, but all I’d see were the hedgehogs who mocked me.”

  On Eve’s very first day Adam had explained to her the rules of the garden just the way God had explained them to him. He had lifted his head up and made his back stiff. He had spoken the way a radio broadcaster from the 1940s would. Another kind of woman, someone softer than Eve, might have found this charming. He explained that, except for the tree of knowledge, every tree in the garden was theirs to eat from.

  “I am a fan of the pear,” Adam said. “It is not unlike an apple whose head craves God.”

  “Tell me more about this tree of knowledge,” said Eve. She enjoyed the sound of it. “The tree of knowledge.” It sounded very poetic.

  “There’s not much to tell,” said Adam. “If we eat from it, we will die.”

  From then on Eve talked about the tree of knowledge all the time. It was tree of knowledge this and tree of knowledge that. It was like it wasn’t a tree at all, but a movie star. Sometimes she would just stand by the tree and stare at it. It was on such an occasion that she met the snake.

  When Eve first caught sight of him, she brought her hand to her mouth and gasped. She had seen some repulsive animals in her day—a booby that percolated her vomit to just beneath her tonsils, a dingo that instilled in her a sublime sense of nature’s cruelty, and a deathwatch beetle that filled her with existential dread—but still, there was something about the snake that made her realize in a flash that the world was anywhere from sixty to eighty percent oilier than she would have ever imagined.

  “Hi,” said the snake. “In the mood for some fruit of knowledge? It’s fruity.”

  “We were told not to eat from that tree, or else we would die,” said Eve.

  “Die! What an ignorant thing to say,” said the snake, all chewing on a blade of grass in the side of his mouth. “If there is a trap door in paradise, then it is not really paradise, is it?”

  The snake made interesting points. That appealed to Eve. He could see he was making an impression.

  “All I’m saying is to give it a try. Many things will be made immediately clear to you once you partake. I can talk about it all day and you still won’t get it. You have a right to at least try it, right? I’m not saying go out and eat an entire fruit. Have a nibble. A nibble isn’t really eating, is it?”

  Eve found arguing semantics exhilarating. But then she thought of what God would say and how he would say it.

  “Thou hast disobeyed me,” He would intone. There would be a lot of intoning.

  She looked at the tree. The way the sun shone through its leaves was beautiful. Everything seemed to point to “Nibble the fruit.”

  Then the snake said: “Think about it. Does God want companions
who can think for themselves, or does he want lackeys and yes-men? Wouldn’t God want a few surprises? God’s telling you not to eat the fruit was just a test to see if you could think for yourselves, to see if you could exist as equals to God. The day you taste the fruit is the day God will no longer be lonely. At least give it a lick.”

  Eve looked at the fruit. Then she looked at the snake. Then, slowly, she parted her lips and pushed out her tongue, all wet and warm and uncertain. She ran its tip along the smooth flesh of the fruit.

  The snake smiled.

  “Has anyone died?” he asked. “Now take a tiny little nibble. Just a speck. Just to see.”

  The fruit was squishy and tart. She smooshed it around in her mouth. She squinted her eyes.

  It was a bit like trying on new glasses. It was a bit like an amyl nitrite popper. It was a bit like a big wet kiss on the lips right at first when you weren’t sure if you wanted to be kissed or not. She felt a thousand little feet kicking at her uterus.

  The idea of her own nudity, as well as Adam’s, had always felt more like a Nordic, coed health spa thing; now, with the fruit of knowledge, it felt more like a Rio de Janeiro carnival thing. Her breasts felt like water balloons filled with blueberry jam and birds. Her nipples were like lit matchsticks. Her thighs, the way they swished against each other, were like scissors cutting through velour.

  With her lips still glistening in tree of knowledge fruit juice, she ran off to find Adam. The snake watched her as he chewed on his slimy blade of grass and, as she receded into the distance, he thought something along the lines of “Now that’s what I’m talking about.”

  “Kiss me, Adam,” said Eve. “Taste my lips.”

  Adam, like any lummox truly worth his salt, could smell the minutest trace of knowledge coming his way, and thus he knew how to avoid it like the plague.

  But yet there was also this: Eve had never sought him out in the middle of the day before just to kiss him. It felt like a very lucky thing. When he took her in his arms, he told her that he loved her with his whole, entire heart.

  He closed his eyes tightly and brought his lips to hers. Then he squinted. Then it started to rain and Eve began to cry.

  During the darkest days ahead, with the fratricides and whatnot, Adam would often think back to his brief time in Eden. As he became an old man, he would talk about the garden more and more. A couple of times he had even tried to find his way back there, but he very soon became lost. He didn’t try too hard anyway. He didn’t want to bother God any more than he already had.

  When Adam met someone he really liked, he would say, “I so wish you could have been there.” It didn’t seem fair to him that he was the one who got to be in Eden. “This sunset isn’t bad,” he’d say, “but the sunsets in Eden! They burned your nose hairs! They made your ears bleed!” He couldn’t even explain it right.

  “When you ate the fruit in Eden, it was like eating God,” he would say. “And God was delicious. When you wanted Him you just grabbed Him.” Now when he ate fruit, he could only taste what was not there.

  But it wasn’t all bad. After Eden, Eve became much gentler with Adam. After getting them both cast out, she decided to try as hard as she could to give Adam her love. She knew it was the very least she could do. She sometimes even wondered if that was why God had sent the snake to her in the first place.

  Adam would tell his grandkids, his great-grandkids, and his great-great-grandkids about how he and Nana Eve had spent their early days in a beautiful garden, naked and frolicking, and the kids would say, “Eeyoo.”

  The children would swarm into the house like a carpet of ants. The youngest ones would head straight for Adam, lifting his shirt to examine his belly for the umpteenth time. They smoothed their hands across his flesh and marveled.

  “Where’s Grandpa’s belly button?” they all asked. He stared at the children—they were all his children—and as they slid their little hands across his blank stomach, he wondered what it was like to be a kid.

  Cain and Abel

  On their first night outside the Garden of Eden, it was windy and cold and the air was full of whistling. They scraped at the tree trunks and dug their fingers into the earth. At the top of their voices, Adam and Eve called out to God.

  “We get it,” they screamed. “You’ve made your point. Now let us back in, already.”

  To fend off the cold, they hugged each other with all their might. They thought about all the things God had said in his wrath: how a little human would one day tear his way out of Eve, how they would no longer live forever, but would one day die. These thoughts made them colder. They slept face-to-face, pressed so tightly together that their noses hurt. Later they would learn to make clothing, but just then, all they had was each other. Nine months after that first night, this would change.

  In the beginning, in the garden, a baby was supposed to be a surprise, appearing as suddenly as a sneeze. The way God intended it, two people in love would share a like-minded pretty thought, and then there it would be—a baby nesting in a tree above their heads. Or someone might lay a cheek upon someone else’s stomach and simply feel happy to be alive, then would come the sudden weight of a baby upon the person’s back. People would like this, too. It wouldn’t be like they’d walk around afraid to have a good time for fear of making babies.

  But the way God intended it did not pan out.

  After He cast Adam and Eve out of the garden, God wed the creation of babies with the act of sex. It was like pairing the eating of a nectarine with a lunar eclipse, the tearing of a fig leaf with a sudden snowfall. Previously it had no inherent logic but since God made logic, now it was the way things would be.

  On the night their child was born, Eve was asleep, dreaming about the ocean. She was swimming beneath it, breathing in the water like it was air. Very carefully, she climbed onto a shark and rode him.

  I am actually doing it, she thought. Then the shark turned its head around and bit off her lower body.

  Eve awoke suddenly. She had begun to give birth.

  Adam hopped from foot to foot as Eve felt the pain crush her into the earth.

  “There’s a head sticking out of you,” cried Adam, “and it has a face.”

  For a minute, Adam thought that this might be what a baby was: just a head that sticks out. He would just have to get used to it. But then, rather quickly, more came out. Shoulders, arms, tiny hands. Yes, this was the baby, and the baby was attached to a vine. After a few days, despite their great care, the vine wore away and baby Cain was freed into the world.

  At the time of her second birth, there wasn’t the same stage fright. Eve knew the drill. She laid herself on the ground and grabbed two fistfuls of grass.

  Forty-three and a half hours later, Abel was born. They called Cain over to meet his new brother. They placed the baby in his arms. The baby was slippery and Cain lost his grip. Abel fell. He lay on the ground, looking up at his brother. He did not cry. Abel could not be rattled.

  Back in those first days, things changed very quickly. A new person being born meant there was a giant spike in the population. For Cain, it made the planet feel lopsided. He watched Eve bounce the newborn in her lap and as she cooed at it, he felt the Earth’s gravity tilt in their direction. It pulled at the insides of his stomach and made him seasick.

  Years later, Adam and Eve would have many more children, but just then, there were only Cain and Abel. Because there was simply nobody else, the brothers became very close. They invented their own language and played each other’s stomachs like snare drums. They butted their heads like goats and cracked each other’s knuckles as though they were cracking their own.

  They were different, though. Abel was a thinker. He thought about things: if he bit off his own pinkie toe, would it grow back? Cain, on the other hand, was a doer. He’d reel back his fist and break a donkey’s nose for the sheer thrill of it all.

  Because of their differing dispositions, Abel became a shepherd, which afforded him long hours of rumina
tion as his sheep grazed, while Cain became a farmer, which allowed him to work with his hands.

  Adam and Eve encouraged both their children to sacrifice a portion of their produce to the Lord.

  “God told us to,” said Adam, “and, considering what He could do to us, it’s probably wise to obey.”

  When they were little, Cain and Abel did a pretty perfunctory job. They treated making sacrifices the way one would take to being forced to talk on the telephone to a crazy and infirm grandfather on his birthday.

  “What does the Creator of the Universe need with cauliflower and dead sheep?” Abel would joke and Cain would laugh.

  One day, when Adam and Eve thought the children were old enough, they sat them down and told the story of what life was like before they were born.

  “In those days, God was like one of the family,” said Adam.

  Eve told Cain and Abel about “the screwup.”

  “What does it mean to die?” asked Cain.

  “We’re not exactly sure,” said Eve. “But basically it means that one day—and this is not any day soon—we will no longer be.”

  There was silence, then Abel spoke up.

  “If we won’t be,” he said, “then we won’t even know that we’re not being. There will be no we to see that we can no longer be, yes?”

  “I guess that’s true,” said their mother. “Well put.”

  Abel smiled and went back to mashing a mutton liver that he was making into pâté for later.

  Cain, on the other hand, felt like a sharp plum pit had been forcefully lodged down his throat. All his life he had felt like himself, that his hands and fingers—that his thoughts—were his own. Now he felt like they were someone else’s, someone who could yank them away at any chosen moment. Until then, it had never even crossed his mind that such a thing could be possible.