TIGERS NUZZLING ANTELOPES. Ocelots and lemurs napping. Small cats picking their way along the riverbank. The moss smells of morning and memory; water curls under and around the trees. A shimmer of wind on fur, first drops of rain falling.
He wakes and moves through the garden, dazed, surrounded by the animals, who may or may not be paying any attention to him. Lion, peacock, bear, wolf, marmoset. He names all of them. In every moment, he hears different birds. He is—what is he now, without her? Each birdcall changes him: he has no edges. The “I” who hears the mockingbird is not the “I” who hears the jay’s raucous scream or the crows, harsh and tender. Crows bury and mourn their dead, gather in circles around the fallen one and drop stones, twigs, flowers, wait there a moment, and fly away.
He sits on the green grass by the river, watching a shape moving in the distance. Here she is. Once familiar, now unknown. His side aches. When she sits on the opposite bank of the river, not so wide, a creek full of ghost fish, he says to her, “Oh, my God, I missed you so much.” He’s angry, irrationally. Where has she been?
She remembers his anger, distantly. She’s a little dazed, returned from the far reaches, the places outside the gate she’s already forgetting. She feels dislocated, senses reawakening.
All the animals in the garden. Roaring, humming, purring, hissing, singing.
He says, “I was waiting for you.” And then, proudly, waving a hand at tiger and antelope, peacock and marmoset, he adds, “I named everyone.”
She feels a flash of annoyance. Annoyance! So stupid. Why did God make them this way? Nothing in her journey gave her an answer. She says, kindly, “I’m not saying you wasted your time, because that’s not a thing. But everyone here already has a name.”
“If everyone already has a name, who am I supposed to look after?”
“That’s life,” she says to him. She went a long way into those reaches. A world beyond this place, but it’s already fading for her. Where she’s been, what she was looking for.
Apparently, thank God, they have a tour guide, swaying upright, a column of shining, jeweled scales. The guide investigates them with faceted, ravenous eyes.
She stares into the guide’s eyes, swaying in response. Almost remembering.
Meanwhile, the man stands back, says, under his breath, “Python, cobra, viper, anaconda, rattlesnake, copperhead, coral snake, mamba. Snake, serpent, reptile.” More names. She can say what she wants to: this is his gift.
The tour guide ignores him, says to her, “Desire stupefies humans. It makes me shrewd. I have an offer for you. One small thing.”
She doesn’t care for this. Out in the far reaches, she learned what lying sounds like. Not a small thing. Shakes her head.
“You want to go back out there, don’t you?” asks the tour guide, silky and sure.
She does, she doesn’t, she has no idea how she did it, how she would do it again. She doesn’t know anything.
She stands and follows the guide to the plundered, ever-restoring apricot tree, fallen fruit rotting on the ground underneath, wasps drinking the juices. Has she been here before? He nods toward an apricot.
She picks it and bites into it, brings one back to where her companion sits by the river.
He turns it over in his hands, wondering. When he tastes it, he feels the juices all through his veins. He can see and hear everything, remembers, for the first time, his dreams.
The tree smell of evening. Water still, curling petals. The wind, the scent of fur and rain. Seedpods crackling. In his dreams, outside the walls, the sounds of the city overrun the forest. A boy strikes down his brother. A roaring: oceans, jungles, wildfires, floods, crowded city streets and markets, what he will come to know as war. Soon these dreams will disappear, and they’ll have forgotten everything they used to know.
They are falling, or they are not falling. Are they evil or are they good? They have mistaken this for a crucial question. By the time the command comes, they are already waiting by the gate.
Sarah Stone is the author of, most recently, the novel Hungry Ghost Theater (WTAW) and, with Ron Nyren, Deepening Fiction (Longman), as well as the forthcoming Marriage to the Sea (Four Way). www.sarahstoneauthor.com
