'here' part 5

Eve's Tale 2

Making up my mind took time. I was all alone. God wouldn’t help me, he just laid down rules. He didn’t even explain long words to me any more. Whenever I tried to talk to Adam, he’d give me more ‘Evie, sweety-pie’ talk. I sometimes had the impression he didn’t even understand what I was saying. He was a bit of a dope, and totally blue-pill (those are words I learned much later, but they fit). Perhaps God really had screwed up his circuits, after all.

I went on wandering and wondering while Adam slept. One morning I was up, awake, walking, and I saw cracks in the very ground of the Garden. They closed up like a guilty thing surprised (another expression learned later). Should I tell God about it? But didn’t He know everything? If He knew everything, why did He need humanoids to watch over His theme park (and another) ?

I was red-pill. I wanted what I called knowingness. If I didn’t eat of that fruit, I would never know the answers to my questions. I would go on not knowing much at all.

The well-known legend about Eve and the Forbidden Fruit tells that flighty little Eve was beguiled (if not seduced) by the subtle Serpent to taste the fruit. Utter myth! The only snakes in the Garden of Eden were small, brightly-coloured, and totally mute apart from whistling happy tunes. There was never at any time a talking serpent. The decision to eat the fruit was mine and mine alone. Not out of weakness, flightiness, or an improper interest for big snakes.

William Blake, Eve tempted by the Serpent

[I love William, but I had to tell him I made up my own mind]

Determined, I went back to that thicket with the straggly vine. The vine hissed at me. I ignored it. I chose a ripe fruit, crimson, its parchment cover falling apart. I reached up, cupped it in my hand, and plucked it. The vine shook and hissed, but I was walking away with the fruit.

I sat down. I tore away what remained of the parchment. The fruit immediately opened out like a flower, where each petal was a fleshy segment. A lovely scent came from it. I detached a segment. It came away easily between my finger and thumb. I raised it to my mouth and bit into it.

Delicious. Inside the crimson skin, the flesh was a delicate shade of pink. It tasted like its scent, but sweeter. Its juice flowed over my tongue and down my throat. I finished the segment.

Nothing happened.

I ate another segment. Then another.

The earth did not tremble.

I didn’t know anything new. Nothing was revealed.

I didn’t have death, whatever it might be. Why had we been made afraid?

I ran back to Adam and shook his shoulder. “Nothing happens when we eat the forbidden fruit!”

“Mmmf?” He rolled over.

I detached a segment of the crimson fruit and pushed it into his mouth.

He sat up. “This is good! Any more?”

I handed him the remaining segments.

He’d been dozing when I told him it was the forbidden fruit. Now he was swallowing half of the fruit I’d picked. There was no harm done that I could see – nothing was happening to either of us. But I had to tell him.

“Adam...”

He was lounging back on his elbows. He was staring at me. Precisely... I was squatting beside him and his eyes were fixed on the area between my thighs. We were both in the state of nature, as we always had been without attaching any importance to the fact. So right in front of me, I could see the little tube through which he voided water. It was growing. It was standing up. The bigger it got and the more it stood, the more I stiffened and warmed in the parts he was looking at, and so it went on. We stared at each other, thought of the congress of the animals – the astonishing memory of seeing a stallion mount a mare sped through my mind – and we ended up on a mossy bank finding out what a congress of humanoids might be. Utterly exciting, breathtaking. No reason to stop. Rolling, panting, moaning, Adam bellowing like a bull, me screaming “Oooh, ooh! Yes! YES!” And on we went.

Then God came by.

“Adam, where are you?”

Well, what do you think happened next? We uncoupled clumsily and scrambled on hands and knees towards some bushes where we hid. Adam’s water-pipe was still standing and I was frankly in all kinds of a mess. A bit further on in the bushes was a nice little fig-tree. We picked leaves from it and did our best to cover the evidence. Then we sat down and waited.

Along came the Ancient of Days. “What are you two up to?” (When He boomed like that, the ground shook.)

With His terrible eye, He glared at our pathetic fig-leaves. “So!” He said. “I knew I couldn’t trust you!”

And He stalked off in Most High Dudgeon.

It wasn’t long before we were thrown out of the Garden of Eden by two gigantic and very menacing archangels. We’d never seen a gate when we’d gone the rounds, but now there was one. God was there beside it. He pronounced a great judgment upon us.

“Morbidus Maledictio!” he proclaimed in bad Latin. “Man Adam, thou and thy prolific progeniture shall surely toil to till the earth all the days of your loathsome lives and earn your brutish bread with the sweat of your brow-bristles. Woman Eve, thou and thy prolific progeniture shall surely bear offspring with prodigious pain and dire difficulties, and all thy daughters and their daughters and their daughters’ daughters shall curse thy name once a month. Go from hence, O humiliated humans!”

All I took from this was, first, we were now humans and not humanoids – surely the effect of eating the fruit. Second, that God was definitely going gaga with all those words beginning with the same sound. Either that, or He’d always had a screw loose.

The gate was closed behind us now, and one of the gigantic archangels was waving a flaming sword to show we could not return. Off we trudged, Adam and I, into the great wild world.

Once we were out of sight of the flaming sword, what do you think we did first?