Free Adam & Eve by Sena Jeter Naslund Page A

the burning morning sunlight, alone and naked, he asked himself, What do you really know about anything? Stealthy as a serpent, memory began to crawl through the convolutions of his brain.
    Burn me! Burn them!
he had prayed to the Middle Eastern sun, while he lay naked, his hands bound behind his back, flat on his stomach on the searing metal of their truck bed. They had put a pair of nylon women’s underpants over his head as they raped him over and over, and he knew that the underwear was meant to be an unbearable humiliation, revenge for something that happened to someone they might have known in the past, but the panties reminded Adam of underwear hung in the sunshine behind the ranch house at home on a gleaming wire clothesline, his mother’s underwear, part of an intimate family array—his father’s undershorts, his own, and in diminishing sizes all those of his younger brothers. The nylon panties placed over his head by his torturers had comforted him. As he had looked through one leg opening straight at the sun, his chin bouncing on the metal bed of the eastward-movingmtruck, he had prayed backward to the setting sun to kill him quickly. Them, too.
    Adam had given up on God and asked the sun for mercy and vengeance.
    Finally one of the soldiers had sent him into oblivion by crashing the butt of his rifle against the side of his head. They must have dumped him into the road. Yes, his body remembered how it curled before he hit the hard-packed sand—how they lifted his feet up and over his head and he spiraled out of the open-ended truck. They must have cut the ropes that bound his hands before they hurled him out.
    That must have happened some days ago, because now he was healing. His body had been blue with bruises. Before they tied his wrists together, they had stamped on his fingers and hands with their heavy boots, but now his flesh was almost pink again, and he could flex his fingers, curl them inward into a fist.
    Yesterday, he remembered, he had flattened and pressed his hand into the sand. Yesterday he had awakened into a holy sheen of light as though for the first time, and the day had blessed and restored him. He had been refashioned and born again in Eden.
    But what else had happened in his life before yesterday had occurred?
    He remembered more from the recent past: a large, hairy monkey had come from nowhere. After they tumbled him onto the hard sand and left him, a large, hairy monkey with a child’s face had given him water and roughly forced fruit into his mouth, then something raw and bloody. But now he was waking up alone.
    And now he must claim his mind as his own. Now he must kneel in the sand and beg for God’s forgiveness. Adam knew that in his pain he had no longer believed in the Invisible, although he had survived. God had saved Adam anyway. He had blasphemed in praying to the sun, but he knew it was the hand of God that intervened and cushioned the blow from the rifle butt so that it damaged but failed to shatter his skull. And God must have put the idea into their heads to throw Adam out, just as He had made the whale cough up Jonah onto dry land, when Jonah’s punishment was complete. And perhaps God was making his torturers feel ashamed of what they had done tohim—six young men dressed like sand in swirls of tan, gray-green, splotches of brown. They wore clothes borrowed or stolen from those who had been dressed once just like himself.
    Now God was making Adam new, and He would come in the evening and walk and talk with him, as was described in the book of Genesis. Here was the beautiful world: palm trees and trees of all possible and impossible kinds and a river. When he turned his head, he saw a sea with blue water dancing in the sunlight. Clouds hanging over water. An ocean transplanted from another geography to delight his eye.
    The sun stood in the sky, a gleaming disk too bright to hold color of any name. God’s shield. Perhaps it was a new sun, risen as it was in a