Eve died first. Women are more durable, they live longer in other settings, but it was Eve who died first. This remarkable woman, whose story was apparently finished once she had painfully given light to a couple of children, was the first creature to experience the darkness of death. She had gone through a few lighter moments with her husband Adama once they had unceremoniously taken leave of the garden. As they had grown older there was a refreshing of the sentiment that they were the people in each other’s lives, for better or worse. They were not always unhappy.
Adama’s turn was later. I don’t know how old he was but he had had to bear up under so many mortifications that he must have felt like he was nine hundred and thirty. Ha ha ha.
But by then there were other people on the scene. Several generations down the line, after a succession of men had lived long and pointless lives according to the Bible (in the years before they suddenly had the length curtailed to a hundred and twenty years of life by executive order), there emerged an old man named Noah. While Noah was a proverbial good man, at this point it becomes more worthwhile to look at how God himself was feeling around this time. For wasn’t this the moment that he became so disgusted with the outcome of his world – his plaything – that he was that close to tossing it all in? He couldn’t have yet been terribly mature in view of the Abraham fiasco that was to come. So perhaps it wasn’t a deep crisis of disillusionment that he felt – but I’m not sure that it was the distraction of a spoilt child either. Some kids like building miniature worlds with Lego and then smashing them to pieces. But he had already gone through that phase a while ago and while old pleasures can be rediscovered later in life for a few brief moments, generally we all move on. So, I don’t know.
Because, it seemed, everything God had ever tried to achieve had blown up in his face. Lucifer and Adama had been friends who had turned their faces away. The dinosaurs had been bestial creatures whose only intent had been to tear each other apart. The garden had been a lovely dream of luminosity and buzzing vibration that had not lasted forever, as nothing ever would thereafter.
When we are depressed, the serene musings that ‘everything changes, but only over time’ generally don’t mean a whole lot. We can only focus on our pain, and desperately wish that the pain ends. This was the case with God in these moments. He wanted it all to end: the world (his world), the human race, his anguish. Refreshing the memories from his pioneering days of repetitive immolation, he decided that one day in the next week the seas would unexpectedly rise.
Noah had lived a long life. Cursed with the long white beard that all Biblical characters had to have in order to be legitimate, he had nonetheless at various stages of his life found a way around this hindrance to be quite productive. It as probably just as well, for he provided the counterbalance to the rest of the human race, which had degenerated. Much like the dinosaurs before them, they stole and ate each others’ eggs (?!) and generally were a nuisance to be around, casually placing daggers into each other’s backs and so on. If only there was a way to regulate them! With, for example, a pair of magical stone pillars or some other similar, crazy idea. But there wasn’t and the murderous race had long ago outlived its novelty value. They had to go. If something makes us unhappy it’s not immoral to dispense with it.
Noah was a level-headed man. Whenever there were clouds on the horizon he could see them – apt, for he would certainly need this foresight when the time would arrive for everyone to pile into the ark. Metaphorical clouds, such as the ones that peppered people’s brows just before they erupted with adverse emotion, did not escape him either.
God was sitting on a low tree branch when Noah approached him. The tree was above a lake, whose water level God was raising and lowering through the power of his divine will and skimming stones across, occasionally striking ducks and flamingos on the side of their heads. It was an appropriate metaphor for the destruction he was planning on a grander scale: to raise the seas and kill creatures. But I don’t blame him for it on this occasion.
Getting a conversation started is never an easy matter. Even nowadays, being able to deliver the perfect ice-breaker to a stranger is a cherished skill. I have no idea what Noah said to begin proceedings (I’m not one of those smooth talkers). My guess is that it was more than a simple commentary on the weather (which in any case was God’s domain and might have offended him anyway).
“…I don’t know, I just don’t know,” God was saying, shaking his head. “You try so many things, and if none of them end up coming off you tend to not want to try anymore. But I don’t see what is left for me if I destroy this world. These worlds are all I ever have. Outside of them there is nothing.”
It was a discussion about feeling, emotion; but it could have equally been about physics. Similar sentiments and ponderings were echoed by many people down the track who expressed in a puzzled frame of mind: what could there possibly be if not the universe? There would have to always be a universe in existence because how can nothingness exist without a universe? By definition, how can nothingness even exist? It doesn’t seem possible for a world to exist as pure nothingness.
“…I need to have something to occupy myself, otherwise I can’t go on and then there’s no reason for my existence either. But I can’t continue doing the same things if they always make me unhappy, and yet I don’t know anything else.”
This need to always be occupied would abate over time for the Supreme One. Eventually he would learn how to be blissful without action, he would evolve into the benevolent God we know today, he would stop treating people (and animals) with cruelty and he would earn the right to be titled with a capital letter: ‘He’ instead of ‘he’. That time had not yet arrived. Nonetheless it’s fascinating to note the clarity of his words, the wisdom, the anguish. How old was he, anyway? Had he grown beyond an immature teenage mind? For they were perceptive comments for a stupid teenager to make. I tend to think that no, he hadn’t grown beyond cruel immaturity – once again, in view of the Abraham fiasco that was to come.
God had a look at the life that lay before him, an eternity of making things for the sake of making them, destroying them (also for the sake of destruction simply to make space for new ones), all for the purpose of forcing his mind to avoid thinking about the sadness of his memories. God, being omniscient, was aware of his future failings in advance and realised that he couldn’t go down that road. He had to find a way to make this world work. It still had potential!
Noah offered the right counsel. I think the line that clinched the decision was: “You can only do what you think will help you. You don’t need to persevere with something that doesn’t work.” God took a scrutinising look at Noah and for the first time was overwhelmed by something other than his own self-absorption and self-pity. He marvelled at Noah’s selflessness and reached the conclusion that some lives, some beauty was worth saving.
“I’m going ahead with my plan, but build a ship and save your family,” he instructed. “I won’t start until the construction is complete.” How businesslike in its tones!
Noah began cutting down trees within the same hour. He inadvertently further undermined the lost Garden of Eden by killing some of the trees that had contributed to its (now fading) virtuosity and splendour. It didn’t matter because the Great Flood that was to come would wipe out whatever magic was left afterward.
One thing I’m left wondering is where Noah obtained the nails to staple together his rudimentary masterpiece. But that was less of a concern than preventing his family from being casually killed by the passers-by in the time that remained. To those passers-by Noah had always been a fool, and these sudden constructional urges were merely yet one more confirmation of that fact. Noah never said a word, not even to his wife or children. What could be said, anyway? “I’m building this boat because we’re going to live but you’re going to die”? No.
In the meantime God spent his time waiting for the end sitting with his shoes off, perched on the edge of a rock pool. The sometimes circular, sometimes twisting and darting motion of the fish held him fascinated, and he realised that he would miss the vagaries of these amazing creatures he had given life to. He listened to the song of the birds (many years later, soldiers would mimic the birds’ calls for altogether different purposes) and felt sad about the sounds and the sights he would miss after he killed them.
How long does it take to build a boat? Or, more pertinently, how long does it take to build a boat so important that it maintains the continuity of an entire race? Who knows, but Noah worked diligently and always maintained his silence over the endeavour. In time, Noah’s hammering and sawing became a permanent part of the background music, his crouched feature so much a part of the landscape, that the other humans got tired of the novelty and forgot to even make fun of him. On he went, whether the rains rotted his wood supplies or the sun streaming down burned the back of his neck so badly that some nights his wife could not even put her arms around his neck with affection for the pain his sunburn caused. He had his reasons, they supposed, and left him at that.
In reality his family had faith in his reasons, but he no longer did. God had made himself scarce since ‘the talk’, mixing with the animals and not giving the time of day to a single human being thereafter. Noah began to have inevitable thoughts that here he was wasting the final years of his life on a pointless endeavour instead of enjoying the (usually pleasant) company of his children, grandchildren and other assorted descendants (there were many because Noah had lived a long time). In a way we should rebuke him. He hadn’t lived for nine hundred years like his forebears (!) but just the same, if we whispered in his ear that these days people are lucky (diligent?) to reach eighty or ninety the idea would have been laughable. How can anything be achieved in eighty years, he would have asked with disbelieving mirth. Later there would be commentaries on this idea. Some, the Lucius Annaeus Senecas of the world, would insightfully say that one lifetime is plenty of time but we waste it. Others would irrelevantly say that humans are impatient but (at least these days) God has overwhelming patience and knows what he’s doing. Yes, but he doesn’t have to die.
More than once, Noah kicked his ark in frustration with his sandalled feet. Sometimes the rusted nails and rotted wood would give way in some places, necessitating that Noah start again in those places his sandalled fury had borne fruit. Perseverance was not its own reward but one sad day, when the sky was filled with black clouds, he finished. The work had left him miserable, but it had nonetheless become a part of him and, like God not being able to see a future for himself all of those years ago, Noah could no longer understand what use he possibly was if not involved in the construction of his archaic wooden vessel.
It seemed that the world had been taken over by the black clouds. While contributing to Noah’s less-than-enthralled mood, they at least gave him the suspicion that his work in fact had not been in vain. The ark was a pretty vessel that, while rudimentary, was grand enough for anyone who had single-handedly built it to be proud of his efforts.
It was at this point that God finally put in a re-appearance. He had spent so much time watching and frolicking with the animals that he’d completely forgotten what had moved him to save some of these humans in the first place. He looked at Noah’s ruddy face, his clawed hands with its multifarious scratches, his stooped appearance and, completely forgetting that it was his own instruction that had contributed to these infirmities, wondered what had impressed him about this man. It was a similar sentiment to what we can feel when we cast our eyes on a friend of the opposite sex after an absence of time, with whom the connection had been more emotional than physical: “What was it that I saw in her?” But a few minutes’ conversation usually dispels the doubts.
For his part, Noah wondered why on earth he had thrown away his autumnal years on this being who hadn’t even stuck around to offer encouragement from time to time. When we hold resentment in our heart towards a person, sometimes seeing that person in the flesh can dispel those feelings and sometimes it can exacerbate them. Noah was about to turn around and walk away in disillusionment when God, seeing his own underwhelmed sentiments echoed in Noah’s weather-beaten face, felt a slight urge of compassion. He did not rush forward to embrace Noah or say anything earth-shattering. He simply held Noah’s gaze, motioned him to stay and stated:
“You’d better get everyone on board. The rains will start soon.”
Noah gathered his extended family together. Some of the younger ones formed a motley crew but they were generally conscientious, understanding people who were worth saving. A portion of them were rather infirm and from a mathematical point of view would die in a few years anyway. They would take up space on the ark and go through food supplies, and would complain about the privilege.
Noah had personally escorted all of those who were unable to help themselves up onto the semi-elaborate raft (let’s face it, it was a glorified raft) when God motioned over to a curiously-assembled collection of animals who were remarkably well-behaved. They all sat stationary and watched proceedings with wide, wondering eyes. “You’re taking them, too,” God said, and Noah’s jaw dropped.
The ark had been designed with enough rooms for Noah’s family; that was all. Noah quickly scanned the options in his head. No matter how he considered the potential arrangements, the logistics simply did not work. The now malevolent, resentful snakes would surely bite and kill the blind, decrepit members of Noah’s family (and probably chomp on them as well). The giraffes’ necks would ache so much in the close proximity of the ark’s walls that that they would surely wish they had perished with the sinners. The constantly mating and excrement-producing animals would come up with smells that man had hitherto not dared to even have nightmares about, smells that would clearly make living conditions unbearable within a short amount of time. And what if they threw up in the dining room, the only room on the ark furnished with a carpet? Noah and his family had only stocked up enough sawdust for themselves!
Noah was about to spiritedly debate the merits of this ingenious plan when a drop of rain splashed onto his nose. God slowly looked up at the sky with a solemn face. The meaning was clear.
Noah and his wife hustled the animals up the ramp and onto the ark. They had to be a lot more careful in the collection process than God had been, being vulnerable to bites, scratches and venom in a way that God was not. For the time being they had not a care as to where the creatures wandered off to once on the ark: getting them aboard was enough of a headache to deal with. While leading a stag up the ramp and struggling every step of the way, Noah looked around for God but saw that he had already deserted them.
God had wandered away into the mountains to spend some quality time alone. Like a worker who enjoys the last day at his job because he knows it’s his last, God felt pleasure and relief at the prospect of soon not having to worry about any of the hassles he’d been dealing with for many years now. His search for the animals he wanted to preserve had not been terribly exhaustive but, he felt, had incorporated many of the better ones. He absent-mindedly forgot a few of the other species, subsequently to drown. He had kept the snakes for their symbolism: “mess with me and you’ll be despised forevermore, like these guys.” This included the anacondas (who preferred to eat their victims alive). An anaconda had once tried to eat God alive when out on one of his solitary musings but God had proven invulnerable to such criticism.
Noah decided not to bother with the anacondas. Why preserve what would certainly prove to be a handful? But these monsters adapted to the water outside the safety of the raft and eventually found a home that suited their adapted natures, in the Amazon.
In the meantime the rats scampered around and were already leaving their droppings. The rhinos were charging the already weakened inner walls and looking for other challenges. The lice were already finding safe houses in the hair of Noah’s terrified family.
The rain was falling more heavily, in fat drops that immediately make one wet if he is unfortunate enough to be caught up in such a maelstrom. Noah was clearly beyond merely being in an unfortunate dilemma. When everyone was in – of both human and bestial species – he shut up the ark from the outside, to the detriment of his concerned family’s mental health. Noah had seen the fracas going on inside the ark and knew that the present situation could not possibly go on in its present state. While his anxious family yelled at him to get in – what on earth was he doing? – Noah sealed up the ark. He had already set the ark upright with stilts so that whenever the whimsical yet merciless floodwaters decided it was time to rise and kill everyone (except the fish; I believe it was a freshwater flood) the ark would gently float on top of its own accord.
Noah had decided during the animal packing stage that death or help was better than living in the ark without either. His sandals constantly slipped in the muddy waters that were building up around his ankles as he ran off in search of the God that had condemned him to life rather than death.
The rain fell, lightning crashed, and yet Noah in his anger and desperation made so much ruckus down below that God could not fail to notice him among the blackness of the falling trees and the other desperate men and women. He made his way down to him, always striving to maintain a serene countenance – for he was God, after all – whatever the turmoil that happened to be going on in his mind at a given moment. Ducks when swimming look so calm above a lake but their legs are paddling furiously beneath it.
As were Noah’s legs paddling furiously. God approached Noah in measured steps as Noah was slipping and sliding across the disintegrating plain. “You need to step in; what’s happening right now can’t go on,” Noah shouted above the rain. His white hair was dripping all over his face, obscuring much of the face although not his words. He kept his fury in check and did not add, You started this shambles, you fix it. Dammit!
God had not realised there would be problems. He sized up the crumbling old man before him without pity or concern. God’s hair was black, gelled into fashionable spikes at the front of his head, and little did he realise that he would evolve to look very similar to Noah with the passage of time. But the main issue remained, beyond the discrepancy of appearance between the two: God had haphazardly figured that the ark could solve both problems (of saving the family as well as the animals). Not only that, but the birds could perch on the ark’s roof if they were tired of the constant flying. But it had been an erroneous line of thought.
There were two ways of looking at the situation: Noah had made the ark, therefore he should have been able to reserve the right of refusal to the generally disgusting, smelly creatures. But God was the owner and proprietor of the world and hadn’t been obliged to warn Noah in advance of impending doom – the call of ‘heads up’ had been a bonus and Noah had never really appreciated that fact. How God suddenly regretted that conversation he had had with Noah that one fateful morning many years ago, how he regretted opening his heart to Noah, however briefly. By committing to saving this family, God was complicating the act of destruction (which really should be a very simple action: after all, it’s much easier to bring an end to things than it is to start or maintain them).
“You can’t live with the animals?” God asked him, puzzled. “Yes, we can,” came the answer, “but we were not warned to beforehand and, furthermore, you needed to warn them.”
God accompanied Noah to the ark. By this stage the earth was breaking off into chunks and floating away but God and (more surprisingly) Noah were able to nimbly hop from island to island. When lesser mortals tried to imitate their actions they were swallowed up by the raging sea.
God surveyed the chaos inside the ark. He was surprised by the behaviour of the animals and came to the conclusion that it’s one notion to enjoy the company of animals and very different one to have to live from minute to minute with their habits, their smells, their lack of civility. He disconcertingly summoned them all, and they responded to him in a way that they would not have responded to any human.
“If you are to survive in here, you need to behave like the humans,” he told the animals, who looked at him with wide eyes but listened with sceptical ears. “You cannot kill anyone. Don’t make noise. Don’t wreck the walls. Don’t give birth to more than one set of offspring while you are in here. And you can only mate with your pair – you are forbidden to go outside your species for satisfaction.” There you have it, the first glimpses of one of The Ten Commandments, primary school discipline, China’s One Child Policy and a freaky hint of what lay beyond normality, all rolled into one.
Showing some of the responsibility he would exhibit around the clock in later years, God stayed in the ark for the rest of the day and the next one too. The main feature of that first day and night was the solemn gathering together of the humans and yes, some of the animals too, to watch the world die.
First the fires went out. They did so before any of the torrential rains started, as if presaging that for those left on Earth, their time was through. In the darkness that was left, the men and women re-lived their deepest regrets and reacted, alternatively, in anger and sadness. They bumped into their own kin without recognising them in the shadows of the clouds and the darkness of their own melancholy. They did not know that they were going to die but they could not fathom the change of mood that had enveloped the world.
They were briefly able to re-light their fires. In the glowing light their haggard eyes asked each other what could be happening. The black clouds closed off the last remnants of blue sky. In the distance Noah was loading up the animals. The time approaching when he would go on his mad dash was yet to come. He had purposely, from necessity, set up the ark far away from the other humans who had scorned him all their lives.
Stray drops of rain began to fall. Although composed of water, they burned the skin of the doomed like the deposits of a sulphur pit. Yet there were no red marks where the rain had struck the faces and arms of the men and women. The drops began to fall faster and soon everyone was coated with a shiny wet hue that paradoxically made everyone’s skin glow with seductiveness and gave them all a sensual physical allure. But they would not be able to use this allure to good effect, for survival was now the only issue.
As the rains became stronger and the drops fatter, streams of varying but always increasing strength began to flow along the ground, biting at the ankles of those that remained, climbing and eventually (but not slowly enough!) swallowing ankles and calves. Solid earth turned to mud as once-solid minds began to turn to insane, fear-inspired mush. As the water level rose to waist level, small children smothered and died. Their sedentary bodies floated to the surface and provided the night’s first debris. People splashed around and bumped into the corpses, stepped on them if they could. They climbed on top of each other and used each other as stepping stones (against the recipient’s wishes) to literally rise up and give themselves hope.
One by one, the smaller trees gave way and fell. The people who clung to the branches fell slowly towards the dark, swirling, muddy waters, still clinging, feeling – what? Is it possible to feel anything other than pure, abject fear in these moments? The trees hit the water and they and their assorted cargo vanished. Bubbles rose up from underneath the surface where doomed last breaths had tried to be taken.
Couldn’t there have been a more peaceful way to achieve these aims? A blinding flash, a meteor? No, for the planet itself was beautiful and needed to be preserved. The taller trees looked on in horror at what had happened to their smaller brethren. These trees, tall from all their years spent on the face of the Earth and also wise from this time spent thinking about their place in the world, could understand exactly what was happening. They had seen the excesses these prototype humans had indulged in and though these old, tall trees had foreseen nothing, their sudden hindsight provided perfect clarity. They suspected that the accursed humans had poisoned the smaller trees whose branches they had been embracing so desperately and, seeing some of the hardier survivors reaching up to try to make a play for the higher branches of their own foliage, drew their branches away in scorn and horror. These humans may have brought doom upon their own heads but they will not sully us with their grimy touch! History would prove just how clever these trees were in their assessment. They survived.
In the darkness of their last thoughts, the last humans turned on each other. Some of the more intelligent ones pondered in the moments their fear-ridden brains gave them a respite: should they have acted differently? But they had been given no instruction, they had always just done what they had known: no more, no less. Even so, they didn’t link the calamity to their own behaviour, sensibly. Why should they have? Did we question the motives of a planet that had chosen to revolt when a tsunami ripped through the Indian Ocean one sunny December day? No, and we didn’t need to.
The others fought each other with fists and debris. The water level aided the cause, as shoving heads underwater became a viable strategy.
The majority of the people who had begun the vigil watching from the ark were not able to stomach the spectacle in its entirety and drifted away with tears falling from their eyes. God stayed until the end, feeling much emotion but not showing it, his dark eyes taking in every part of the scene below and spread out around him. People struggled desperately to keep their heads above the water, kicking furiously with their legs as heads drifted above and then below the waterline, gasping, asking for a deliverance they were not destined to receive. The ones left were the ones who had avoided the fighting, the blaming, the scrambling. They had the energy and will left from reserves unknown, and for their tenacity they probably deserved to be saved, to live. What could they have contributed to humanity? The gigantic waves that poured over the struggling remainders were occurring with regularity now and yet they were not putting an end to the struggle. Yes, these last humans had proven their worth and deserve to be remembered. They couldn’t all have been malevolent, those who perished.
The lighting had stopped and the rain had slowed to a graceful, gentle drizzle. But there was no stopping the horrendous tidal waves that, when they crashed over those in the water, obliged them to swim forever upward to break the surface for a few sobbing gasps of the elixir that wasn’t able to fill their lungs before the next wave jumped on top of them and started the process over again. The reserves of energy drained with every repetition and there were only a few left now. They were now having to use copious amounts of will to compensate for the increasing lack of physical ability to continue making the long swim upwards, and some of them didn’t have enough will to continue the futile quest. At a point in time, they would realise with resignation that they had nothing left, neither in the arms, nor the legs, nor the mind. Then they would let themselves drift downward until their screaming lungs would less-than-politely ask that their mouths open up into a wide ‘O’ and give them a breath. Their bodies would oblige, the mouth would open and water would come pouring in. At that point it would be close to the end. The lungs would realise that they had been tricked and all that could be felt would be blinding, life-ending pain. There would be no ability for reflection. But some say that your life then flashes before your eyes: the luminescent parts, the few snapshots of happiness that jump out from the overwhelming amount of life that is merely used to pass time, the uninteresting parts that only serve the purpose of helping the arrival of the snapshots and whose time is immediately forgotten. I cannot confirm whether this actually happens or not because I’ve never died before, I don’t have a memory of ever having died before.
The pain (with or without the life flashes, but probably without) would go on until a malfunctioning brain would shut down. And at that point the pain would stop, though the recipient would know nothing about it, and blackness would be all the eyes would see, if the darkness hadn’t already descended beforehand. But perhaps the eyes would not see or register this black vision because they would already be without life. This, the pain, the brain turning off, the darkness, this is death.
The last one was a man who could have contributed to the world. God would watch him go under and each time wonder if he would come back up again. But the last time he went under God’s infallible intuition immediately knew that he was not coming up again. Because the Bible suggests that no one went to Heaven until Jesus died, that was the end. God remained watching the seas for a long time even after there was no longer any death to observe. The waves calmed a fraction but there was no possibility of flat seas for many weeks to come. The waters no longer moved with rage but still rocked the ark viciously. It would have been symbolic for the sun to appear on the horizon to usher in the end of this night of perdition but half the night was still to come and seeing the world consent to the stench of death by shining its light on it would have been a betrayal. If anything it was darker now.
God left his viewing point to walk aimlessly along the ark’s corridors, occasionally stepping over a skunk or tortoise. Aimlessly, for there could be no aims for anyone on the ark beyond staying alive and hopefully not suffering too much for the privilege. No one could look God in the eye while he was on this one of his many famous solitary musings, but he equally would not have been able to match anyone’s gaze had they been so bold. What did they feel about God after having witnessed such carnage? Respect that he had had the conviction to carry out an act that, although stomach churning, had been necessary? Fear and loathing? Awe at the incredible power at his fingertips? Pity for his now drained state, his head down, his breath quickened? Probably not pity, for they didn’t know him well enough and were too breathtaken by his action to look at him with normality.
He left a day later. The sun had eventually risen and then set again. The ark’s inhabitants could not work out which was worse: having light thrown onto the extent of the immolation, with the bodies floating around and the vultures swooping down from the roof of the ark (God, at least, had been correct in assuming the birds would be happy to be perched there)… or the onset of the darkness, the night, which brought back the memories of feelings, of the screams, the horror. The majority of humans would not look at the night with the same degree of trust ever again.
In his absence the ark’s inhabitants looked at each other in confusion, animal and human alike. What was left to be done now without the one who had blessed them all with their current predicament? They would continue to wander around the ark like zombies for the next month and a bit, not saying a word to each other, sometimes staring out at the sea world they had inherited. But after an amount of time they lost hope of a resolution. The sea would never change, land would never rise again. They assumed the termites would eventually bring the ark to ruin over time, in the moments that they too were not looking at each other in soundless confusion.
A fragile peace existed between the diverging species, no doubt supported and upheld by God’s original tête-à-tête with the animals. Perhaps that’s why barely anyone said a word: a ‘peace’ like that can be broken at any moment with the wrong utterings.
Noah wandered in and out of sanity throughout those mentally empty yet exhausting times. His family did likewise but never to his extent. Mental well-being lies in between the two extremes of over stimulation and zero stimulation (as always; balance between two extremes is the key, for everything). Yet for the last ten days of the vigil he was nothing but completely alert as to the happenings of the ark and the outside world. As custodian of the ark and its inhabitants he saw all and knew all. He knew, for example, that the snakes were risking God’s wrath on multiple counts. In a throwback to the days of the garden, the snakes had taken to playing malicious games of dice and cards, from which the winner would have the first crack at eating the mice once the peace broke. He also knew that fish had started swimming in the still-high floodwaters in large schools that decided together through collective osmosis in which direction they would next turn.
The fish were an indication that life had finally returned to the Earth after thirty-odd days of figurative ‘darkness’. Because one of the aspects that had contributed to the stunned stupefaction of the first thirty days was the pure sparseness of the Earth, its lifelessness. While the seas had continuously raged, only somewhat letting up every day without fail when the sun rose, the absence of other movement on the horizon or in the skies contributed to the solemn torpor. I suppose the birds could have broken the spell but they too were all held in place on their perches on the ark’s roof, held there by the force of feeling.
The fish gave Noah the first inkling that all was not lost. Any life existing outside the ark was surely a good sign. Later, in his search for further good signs and assurances, he would be greeted by the not-quite-fulfilling sight of a rainbow. That was hardly his concern for the moment. His brief was not to take his eyes off the fish as they twisted, darted and rested in languor en masse, as he tried in vain to confirm for a fact whether the beautiful sight was an illusion or not. He tried to make the vision persist forever but it disappeared.
Noah told no one about what he had seen, in the same way that in the past he had not said a word about why he was constructing an archaic water-based vessel so far inland. Why fruitlessly raise hopes over what had surely been illusion? The peace would shatter, the mice would be eaten, everyone – not just the rhinos but humans too – would begin charging the walls skull first; the entire structure would fall apart (both the physical structure of the creaking wood as well as the arrangement of near-cooperation between human and animal) and they would all drown in bitterness and water.
Another few days passed and Noah despaired. Perhaps it would have been better to not see the fish, he thought. Because he could have continued in the hopeless state of automated, zombiefied function indefinitely, but the addition of hope turned him into a human again, melted his heart and threatened to break him. He called for a bird to come down from the top of the ark, hoping that the other birds would remain in their frozen ways and notice nothing. How had they not seen the fish? he wondered, unless they had not been real. The birds showed no compulsion to return his interest. They stared out over the water, unblinking, unmoving to the point of death. He threw a stone towards them, aiming for it to fly across their faces and hoping to be the first being to attract their attention since they had uncomprehendingly witnessed carnage. But his throw was too successful. It gently plonked a bird on the side of its feathery belly. Although the throw clearly did not have the force to cause harm the bird motionlessly toppled into the water, prompting Noah to doubt whether it had ever been alive. Were any of the other birds still on this Earth beyond the shells that remained perched on the ark’s rooftop?
Noah would not wait another forty days to find the answer. He climbed up to the roof, the ‘birdhouse.’ His eyes would be pecked out for the intrusion if necessary but at least it would let him know that he was alive. For the moment there was no danger of that happening. The birds did not turn or breathe to indicate that they acknowledged his carefully creeping presence, edging his way not so much for fear of the soulless birds as for the very real concern of plummeting into the water. He went so far as to touch them but bird after bird that he gently tapped would invariably flip over into the water without doing anything to recognise their own demise. Tired of the entire charade, he took a raven into his hands and squeezed it. The act inserted life into the creature. It squawked horrifically and woke the others from their somnolence, which in turn lifted them into the air as one and demanded that Noah pull himself flat onto the roof and cover his head, while still clinging to the horrendously ugly black alarm clock that was the raven.
The birds circled Noah. Head determinedly down, he wondered why on earth he had worked to preserve any of these monsters. He had lived through too much distress over the years to now be killed by these inconsiderable birds! The birds, sensing his will, gave up their circling and potential swooping and headed out to sea en masse. But not all of them: the gentler ones stayed put, the difference being that this time they did so as living creatures.
Noah got down off the roof and stepped onto the floor that had been his abode for so long. The raven clearly hated him and Noah forcefully ordered that the raven go off in search of life in order to help the ark. Of course the raven did not come back.
A dove looked down at the ragged scene below her and felt a shudder of pity. Noah may have felt that he had exhausted his last avenue towards the faded possibility of being able to live again. The dove took it upon herself to find hope for the inhabitants, and quickly. For although the other humans and animals had seen nothing of the school of fish and had not accordingly had their hopes raised, they all knew that the birds had suddenly and inexplicably taken flight and the sense that the birds had somewhere else to go but they didn’t only added to the sudden restlessness on the ark.
The dove took flight. It stopped to coo in Noah’s ear, meaning reassurance, but Noah took it the gesture as a mocking one and a scowl showed on his face. He could surely not have had very long left to live even if he did one day make it onto dry land again in his life. His spirit had become too twisted, he had become too used to deception, disappointment and bitterness. He had continued running the ship with a strong hand, but only out of a sense of duty for all of the others, including the despised animals. Not for himself. He had lost the belief that all would turn out well, and even if a new world could have been magically offered to him then and there he would not have been able to accept it, for his mind could no longer accept the possibility of favourable resolution. Therefore his body would not have been able to live the dream come true because a body must always follow the mind that manipulates it.
Vast blue expanses spread out above and below the dove as it worked its way on its desperate mission. What the dove needed to find was a fracture in the blueness. On and on the voyage continued, day after gruelling day without finding a place to land. The muscles of the dove’s wings strained and asked why they couldn’t simply stop for a rest, for they had been working overtime for hundreds of consecutive hours. The dove’s head replied: because, without solid ground beneath you, rest equals death.
The dove began to realise and identify with the mental overload that the animals and humans down below in the ark’s hold had gone through staring indefinitely at blue nothingness with first hope, then despair and finally a frozen acceptance. She thanked the stars that the birds themselves had merely been lulled into suspension without either the hope or the anguish that should have preceded it. Physically, the others in the ark had not had to endure the gruelling weariness that hindered the dove and yet she felt grief for their plight.
Eventually, in the dark recesses of what was later left of the dove’s wits, she dreamily saw a sturdy tree branch poking out of the water. Her eyes were narrowed through sheer absence of anything left in her brain and for that reason she saw the miraculous apparition through a film a blackness that had steadily been descending on the higher reaches of her vision. She fell onto the branch as if shot by a bullet from below, without control or care. She stayed there for several days, recovering what she had given to the four winds in her mad search, constantly hugging up to the branch to ensure that it would not disappear on her like so many dreams of tree branches had done before.
She took a piece of twig back to the ark. The flight back was just as arduous, with the added burden of having to constantly guard against dropping the proof of her fidelity. Her beak ached and she could not change the position of the twig in her mouth. It had been very difficult to leave the branch, which had been her only measure of comfort ever since the entire flood nightmare had begun. She was back to navigating pure blue expanses again. But she didn’t have the steady nerve to hold her vigilance against such a foe again and toppled the moment she saw a break in the uniformity below. Fortunately it was the ark, and she landed on the ark floor in front of Noah.
Noah regarded the fallen present from the sky with pure astonishment. As far as he knew, all of the now unloved birds had either flown out to sea or still remained on the ark, once again lulled and now huddled in groups of three (see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil). The dove cooed in order to discard the burdensome twig and to communicate a message to Noah. Then, like the original marathon runner who would similarly utterly exhaust himself to communicate a message after desperately hurtling from Marathon to Athens, she died.
Noah saw what the dove had brought to him and knew the answer immediately: the end was near. Where there are living trees, land will soon follow. He reflected on the dove’s generosity in giving her life simply to reassure him and wondered where such a sense of service had arisen from in the seething den of distrust that the ark had become. It was time to end this thing, this poor charade of what life had originally promised. He took a gamble, called everyone in (those who had not died) and promised them land within seven days.
They got it in four. Noah knew that revolt was the answer if he had guessed wrong, but he was at the end of his tether and simply no longer cared. He would be killed if necessary. He had done all he could do, and then some. The animals waited, hoping that land would not be found so that they would have their justification for killing the humans who had preserved them in this prison, who by now were weak and haggard.
After four days, four days in which the humans were all fearful except for Noah, who had complete faith in his own word, the ark scraped land, bumped it and stayed put. Another day passed in which the water level lowered and sank into the ground as if by magic. They were at the top of a mountain and every inhabitant, from ant to elephant to everything in between, spent the last day at the ark’s seaboard looking around in wonder. Noah wanted a sign that reward would be coming to him for his custody of the ark, for he had surely held the entire ramshackle operation together single-handedly and had saved all of the lives now spread out before him chattering at the ark’s vantage points. His answer came, once the water had receded completely and the soon to be released occupants gaped at the rocky slopes of the mountainside with complete awe, in the inconsiderable form of a rainbow splashed across the sky. Noah’s reward had been that he was the first person or animal to ever see one.
Noah was less easy to please than the others, who gallivanted around the ark in delirious joy and pure relief, tears flowing from the eyes of even the snakes (who, caught up in the moment, had forgotten about their pre-planned gastronomic urges). The rainbow was a promise from God that he would not destroy the world again because he finally understood the angst that it had entailed to all involved, but Noah had long been through with symbology. He wanted definite words of thanks and praise from the definite mouth of a certain definite being who he wanted to be definitely standing in front of him, but it was not forthcoming. Noah spat on the ground with the familiar fury that he had otherwise experienced when he had been traversing the rain and the collapsing terrain on his mad dash at the beginning of the nightmare. He did not stop to address the occupants, for he did not have God’s oratory skills and knew that they only wanted one thing. He threw open the doors and everybody, human and animal, without acknowledging either each other or the fact that they had all shared an extraordinary happening, dashed off the wooden vessel and never so much as looked at each other ever again, except to occasionally eat each other in the future. Humans and animals had spent forty days of peace together but they would not need to do so again: humans would eventually build themselves concrete worlds with houses, electric lights, footpaths and bug exterminators so that they would need never mix with the animal world thereafter. Perhaps it wasn’t the most unintelligent course of action: who wants to be eaten alive?
Noah had had his fill with this God character. He never saw or spoke to him again and nor would he recommend him to any of his friends. In fact if asked for his opinion he would have remarked that God was a bit of a dodgy operator; there was something not quite one hundred percent about him.
The animals would continue to evolve. The basic specimens that had been cooped up on the ark would take the kind foundation that God and Noah had bestowed on them and move with it until they had subdivided and created several new wondrous creatures. The ark could not have spawned the marvels of the Galapagos Islands or the Australian continent. Evolution was still in progress and would always continue to be.
But how did the humans evolve? Noah’s family was righteous and each of them knew that they, the human race, could not return to the lazy practices of randomly killing each other for the sake of it. But there were a limited number of people left in the world. As Charles Darwin later speculated on, the genes of any new being that enters the world need to be the product of two completely different, unrelated parents. The structure of this new offspring will therefore be completely unique to the world. In this way the germs and illnesses of the world become confused and need to find new ways to try to attack that new person’s organism. An offspring of two people who are already related will have a constitution that nature will find easier to attack, for nature will already be used to the same genes that the similar parents have given him. Since the human race needed to re-form from the roots of the one family that remained – Noah’s descendants – the human race had no choice but to re-spring forth from the product of incest. The consequence of this was that the genes of subsequent offspring would invariably be flawed: as would the entire species be.
