by Tom Pollack
More than three months passed on the stationary vessel. For Cain, this was the most trying part of the whole ordeal. He was desperate to leave the ark. Indeed, he had devoted most of his time over the last several weeks to planning how he would explore the earth. On his mind as well was how he would escape from the ark unobserved. If Noah stood at the only doorway to bid the animals farewell, as he had stood there to greet them months ago, Cain could not avail himself of that exit. He would have to improvise, depending on circumstances. In any case, he thought with a grimace, he could use the chute leading through the transom if he had to, lowering himself by means of a rope to the ground.
During this time, Cain also pondered what Noah had revealed about God’s purposes. It seemed clear that Enoch had been targeted for supreme punishment, and part of Cain seethed with resentment at the annihilation of his life’s work. Had God willed Cain’s destruction as well, and, if so, was it just a matter of time? Although he had been protected by the ark, was his destiny to be obliterated once he left the vessel? And how would this be consistent with the mark God had placed on him and with his apparent longevity—perhaps even immortality?
***
Finally, Noah declared that he had received God’s command to leave the ark. As the patriarch, his family, and the animals began to disembark, Cain bided his time, and his patience was rewarded. Noah’s first act on dry land was to build an altar of thanksgiving. He and his sons prepared a sacrifice. As the smoke from the altar rose to the heavens, a brilliant rainbow appeared in the sky. After months of clouds and rain, the colors shocked the senses with their intensity and beauty.
Noah and his family gazed up at the glorious phenomenon. Rapt, they failed to notice a man leading a pair of horses down a narrow path behind the ark. Strapped to the backs of the beasts were some caged chickens, several sacks of grain, a spear for fishing, and a bow and arrow.
As the rainbow burned in the sky, Cain set his face toward the horizon and walked without looking back.
CHAPTER 16
The Great Wandering
DETERMINED TO PUT AS much distance between himself and the tribe of Noah as possible, Cain traveled as swiftly as he could. As the ark faded into the distance behind him, he turned and raised his fist in a final gesture of indignation. He had survived, but for what? Noah’s God seemed to have blessed the ark builder and cursed the stowaway.
Cain navigated by the sun and the stars. The horses were fresh and eager for the journey, though they traveled through a world that was eerily silent, save for the occasional call or wing beat of a passing bird. He almost missed the cacophony of the ark. Its protection had been welcome. Now he was free to travel anywhere, yet with no fixed goal to give him purpose, nor human companionship to give him solace.
With game animals not yet available, he headed for open water, following the banks of the nearest large river toward the sea and watching for the flight of marine birds. Fish were his diet for some time. When he reached the nearest coastline, it proved hospitable. Gathering vegetation and the trunks of dead trees, Cain fashioned a rough-hewn camp. Clams and other crustaceans along the beach offered sustenance, and with practice he managed to spear a good number of fish in the shallows. In the first year, the horses foaled.
As an abundance of plant life returned to the world, Cain wondered if the great flood had wrought any change in his punishment. To probe the matter, he decided on a test. Although God had said the earth would never be fruitful for him, he tried planting the seeds he’d taken from the ark. But the effort was in vain. The result was a patch of ugly, stunted weeds with dark green leaves and blood-red veins.
Cain could not bear to look on what he had sown. Ripping the accursed plants out of the ground, he buried them in a shallow grave on the beach. The next morning, a violent itching burned his hands, kindling a fresh rage at his tormentor as he realized anew the gravity of his destiny—he could survive in this world, but only as a wanderer.
The eternal wanderer.
***
The master of spirits visited Cain as he slept.
“You are happy, Cain?”
“What have I to do with happiness, spirit? No, I am angry.”
“As well you should be. What kind of god is this destroyer? He vaunts that he has created all, and then he annihilates all. How can such a god deserve our allegiance? He is malicious and malevolent.”
“But I did not drown. The ark kept me safe.”
“And to whom should you be grateful for this outcome, Cain? It is I, and I alone, who saved you. The huge wave, the dangling rope, the porthole—I led you then. And I preserve you now.”
“For what purpose, spirit?”
“I safeguard you against a natural death. God has punished all of humanity for your parents’ ambitions. You can blame him for the sorry plight of mortals.”
Death. Punishment. Blame. The words rose to a crescendo even as the voice of the master of spirits dimmed. Another voice replaced it, a voice from far in Cain’s past.
“Where is your brother? Where is Abel?”
“I don’t know. Am I my brother’s keeper?”
“From now on you will be a homeless wanderer on the earth.”
“My punishment is too great for me to bear! You have banished me from the land and from your presence. Anyone who finds me will kill me!”
“No, for I will give a sevenfold punishment to anyone who kills you.”
Cain wrestled in his sleep. Whom did he believe? Whom could he believe?
***
As the earth regenerated, animals spread once more across its face. Cain surmised that Noah’s descendants were likely spreading as well, but where were they? Where was he?
Cain paced the world with restless steps, seeking something he could not quite name. Traveling the length and breadth of the postdiluvian landscape, he discovered marvel after marvel: a great inland sea that stretched beyond the reach of his eyes, yet came together at a narrow strait to empty into an even more vast body of water; mountains that seemed to reach past the clouds, some spewing fire and ash from their highest reaches; sections of beaches transformed into glass by the fearsome power of lightning; a mighty river that flowed through a desert and flooded the sand with life-giving water; beautiful crystals in a shallow cave that shone like stars in the morning sun.
And so the years became decades, and the decades flowed into centuries like rivers into the ocean. Cain stayed for a time in places—long enough to hunt, or fashion pottery, or sing melancholy songs by the shore of a lake, accompanied by an animal-skin drum or a hollow reed—but always a distant urge called him onward. In the great stretches of silence, when he could hear the desolate moan of wind on some towering desert spire, Cain understood what he was really listening for.
The sound of human voices.
The gulf between his past and present was anguishing. Having used people to further his own ends for untold generations, Cain now longed for the simple pleasure of human contact. Not to control, or command, but simply to converse. Yet all he heard was the sound of his loneliness.
Most terrible of all was the void of his future. Nature could sustain him indefinitely, Cain knew, but was a future without human fellowship one in which he wanted to live? Immortality, he understood for the first time, was a curse, not a blessing.
***
Having wandered for eons, Cain sought rest. In the desert, south of the great inland sea and west of the great river, he found a giant depression in the earth. It contained a massive freshwater lake, perhaps two weeks’ journey in circumference. Finding no source feeding the oasis, he figured these waters remained here from the flood. Cain lingered long at this spot, for the hunting was excellent. Migratory flocks of birds and land animals congregated here in huge numbers. He also decided that he would now simply wait here for people to find him.
Remaining at a fixed location for decades on end, Cain took advantage of the clear desert nights to track the movements of stars and planets. On windless days, he dre
w celestial maps in the sand. Many clusters of stars resembled animals, he thought, and he named the patterns for his own amusement: lion, bear, crab, scorpion. And then there were rare exceptions to the usual routine: full eclipses of the sun and moon, meteor showers, and—most spectacular of all—comets. Even these long-tailed wonders, though, seemed to obey laws and be subject to patterns. An especially bright comet that Cain observed recurred every seventy-five or seventy-six years. Eventually he stopped counting how many times he saw it grace the heavens.
What he did not lose count of, however, was the diminishing number of animals visiting his now significantly shrunken oasis. Reluctantly, he reached two conclusions: First, God was apparently compelling him to resume his wandering. Second, and more galling, Noah and his clan must have died off long ago.
He would never see another human being.
***
One torrid morning, a few days after an unrelenting sandstorm had swept past, Cain climbed to a high point to scan the environs for a passing herd of beasts in search of water. Approaching the edge of a tall cliff, he noticed how mighty the lone cypress tree there had become. Long ago—or was it yesterday?—it had been a sapling. In his abject solitude, Cain had lost all sense of time.
So it was that he called out in daylight on the master of spirits. Cain decided he would assent to the spirit’s claim that it was he who sustained life—and if that was true, Cain determined, he would tell the spirit he was ready for the afterlife.
“I am weary, spirit. I cannot face a life of wandering anymore.”
“Yes, Cain, it is so. God has punished you unjustly.”
“You have told me many times that I am not to blame for Abel’s death.”
“True, my friend. God’s mistake of rejecting your fine offering caused Abel’s death, not you.”
“But now, I am ready to join my brother.”
“And how will this come to pass?”
“Release me, spirit. You claim to be the cause for my survival. I no longer wish to live.”
“Death may not be the end of God’s punishment. It is possible that death may be only the beginning.”
“I don’t care about possibilities. My life now is barren torture. I can’t go on.”
“Then I will help you. But I will not cancel your restorative powers. Your life on earth will end only if you have the courage to take it yourself. That is your very greatest power, Cain.”
“What would you have me do, spirit?”
“The means are at hand. A leap from this cliff is the act of only a second, but it is also an eternal act. It is fitting that your grave will be an oasis. Death will be the source of life. You will join me forever!”
The voice dissolved in air. As Cain stood near the edge of the cliff, he pondered what the master of spirits had called the act of “only a second.”
Then the other voice, the voice from long ago, resounded in Cain’s head.
“I will give a sevenfold punishment to anyone who kills you.”
He was trapped. Paralyzed. Would God’s sevenfold punishment extend to him if he took his own life—and for eternity? Breaking down, he sank to his knees.
“I curse you, master of spirits!” Cain cried. Pounding the sand, he called on God himself to end his life, but the long-absent voice remained silent. He planted his face in the dust of the earth and wept bitter tears. Just as the grains of sand inexorably slipped through his clutched fingers, so too had all meaning been emptied from his life.
Looking again over the edge of the cliff, Cain was shocked nearly witless—not by what he saw, but by what he heard.
A thin, high-pitched voice. A human voice.
It echoed from a short distance away to his left. The language was foreign, but its tinge of fear was palpable. Was this a trick of the spirit to entice him over the cliff’s edge?
Cain crawled on his hands and knees to the very edge of the overhang with its dizzying vista. Just below the drop-off, but not visible until now because of the angle, a small boy clung to a rocky outcropping. Far below, at the base of the cliff, an older boy stared upward, extending his arms in a pleading gesture.
The boys had evidently been separated. Playing near the edge of the cliff, the younger child had taken a misstep and then, by some stroke of good fortune, managed to grab hold of the outcropping to avert a fatal fall. Meanwhile, the older boy had caught sight of him from the floor of the oasis and was shouting advice or encouragement from below.
It was clear that the child was tiring fast and would soon be unable to sustain his hold. Just as the boy’s arms buckled and his feet grated along the gravel, Cain stretched full-length at a downward angle and grabbed him by the wrist.
Cain and the boy locked eyes. This was the first human face into which he had looked since before being saved by the ark. In that split second—as the boy’s thin frame dangled from the end of his rescuer’s powerful arm—Cain decided that he would not end his own life.
He had snatched this boy back from the edge of death. But the boy had saved him as well. Hope welled inside him—he had found human civilization again. The earth was no longer his to roam alone.
He pulled the boy all the way to safety and stood up to brush the dirt from his chest and legs. As he did so, he looked over the edge of the cliff and saw a gathering crowd of people. From their pack animals, Cain understood that it was a trading caravan—and a caravan meant that there were once again cities.
The group clambered up the steep trail Cain had taken on the other side of the cliff, and they soon joined him, smiling and laughing, at the summit. One of the men, whom he took to be the child’s father, lifted him gently out of Cain’s arms and kissed the boy’s cheeks repeatedly.
More and more people emerged, seemingly out of nowhere. Cain was soon surrounded by men, women, and children, all happily greeting him in an unintelligible tongue. Sign language eventually cleared up the mystery of their sudden appearance at this spot. Their caravan had become lost in the sandstorm, and they had ended up in the same oasis that he was calling home.
But to where had they been traveling when the storm disoriented them? The boy’s father drew a picture in the soft sand. It showed a long river, crowned by a broad delta. It was, without much doubt, the great river Cain had surveyed so long ago to the east.
Elated to join these travelers, Cain made the man understand that he could serve as their guide. The caravan adopted him, though this time not as a stowaway. His rescue of the child meant that they would treat him as one of their own. The great wandering had reached its end.
On the way to the river, Cain happily learned a new language: Egyptian.
CHAPTER 17
Malibu, California: Two Days Ago
IT WAS JUST AFTER eight o’clock on Friday morning when Laura Mendez reached Amanda’s apartment. Although not a morning person, she had set her alarm for an hour earlier than usual to keep her promise to feed Plato. As she rubbed the remaining sleep from her eyes in the slanting rays of California sunshine, Laura noticed the yellow Jeep Wrangler in its usual parking slot.
“Hmmm…she must have taken a cab to the airport last night,” Laura murmured as she turned the key in the door.
“And left in a hurry,” she added, noticing a heap of dirty clothes on the floor. Amanda’s place was normally a bit untidy, save for her immaculately organized desk and bookshelf, but Laura had never seen this much disarray. After giving a few brief strokes to Plato, who was sprawled on the center of the desk, Laura scooped up her friend’s laundry and went to the bathroom to toss it in the hamper. As she passed the bedroom, Laura noticed the unmade bed with Amanda’s childhood teddy bear and her XBox game controller on it.
In the bathroom, a wetsuit hung in the shower next to Amanda’s surfboard, which was emblazoned with a Marine Corps logo. “Roger James holding his daughter up on the waves,” Laura thought with a pang, remembering the charismatic ex-Marine. The sentiment only magnified when she began making Amanda’s bed, as a paperback her friend had
been reading tumbled out of the covers to the floor and ejected its bookmark—the memorial card from Mr. James’s funeral service.
On the card, beneath the decorated Marine’s photograph, was the Bible verse: “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?”
Laura reflected back to that sad day, recalling how her friend handled the sudden tragedy of her father’s death. Amanda was so grief-stricken that, in planning the funeral, she had only this verse, her mother’s favorite, to draw on.
She remembered Mr. James’s funeral clearly, but even more so the aftermath. She recalled how the words of that Bible verse on the memorial card had triggered several anguished, late-night conversations between her and Amanda. The phrase troubled her friend deeply, who had confessed to Laura that her mom and dad were at odds over religion. He had always boycotted the Sunday services Amanda attended regularly with her devout mother until her death. Amanda had desperately wanted to know whether her dad was in heaven, but Laura didn’t have much of an answer to comfort her with.
At least during those terrible days, Amanda had Juan Carlos.
A sudden clatter punctuated by a thud broke Laura’s reverie, and she returned to the living area just in time to see Plato leaping from the desk and emitting a series of plaintive meows. He had dislodged several framed photographs, which now lay strewn on the floor. Fortunately, no glass was broken.
“Have patience, my little philosopher king,” Laura reprimanded. As she opened the can of food for him, Plato rubbed rapturously against her leg.
After she fed him, Laura began replacing the photographs, trying to remember where they belonged on the desk. There was a picture of Amanda at the age of twelve with her parents at the Great Wall of China, just before her mom passed away. Next in chronological order, another photo showed a blue-gowned Amanda at high school graduation in Japan. “Braces still on,” commented Laura as she shook her head affectionately. More recent snapshots included a group photo of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority girls at a beach volleyball game, and a picture of Amanda and Laura after they won their first nine-ball tournament.
