Eve: A Novel (17 page)

Lilly couldn’t help herself. As John pushed her past, she reached out and tried to turn the knob. It was locked.

“You don’t want to know,” said John, without slowing or turning around.

“Really? I thought I wanted to know,” she mumbled.

“Lilly, mystery creates a space where trust can thrive. Everything in its time, and timing is God’s playground. Trust me, being surprised by everything is so much better than needing to control everything.”

Lilly wasn’t sure if that was true but didn’t respond as they entered the Records Room. It was bright and almost tropical in pale blues, purples, and whites. Looking down, she half expected there to be sand between her mismatched toes. The thought made her smile.

Like the Chamber of Witness, the Records Room was quite modest. A square table stood in the center, one chair on each side. Each of the four seats looked like a mix of work chair and step stool, with high and interlaced backs. The table surface appeared to be alive, shifting dramatically between sandy browns and watery blacks.

Along one wall, trays protruded from slots less than an inch wide. Each of these held a very thin black tablet.

“This is where you will record all that you witness, Lilly,” explained John.

The others shrugged, which Lilly took to mean they didn’t understand it either.

“I told you I’m not a good writer,” Lilly said. “And my spelling
is atrocious, and what if I forget the stuff I witness?” She already felt like a failure.

“Not to worry.” John smiled, indicating the room with an upturned hand. “Look around. No writing instruments.”

“I thought this is where I record what I see?”

“What you witness, Lilly.”

“So how does this work?”

Walking over to the slots, he scanned the tablets until he found the one he was looking for. After pulling it out and opening it, he laid it on the strange table. The tablet vanished into the surface much like Simon’s mirror. John pushed her chair in front of it, and she looked closer.

“Can you see it?” he asked.

“Barely,” she answered. “The very faint reddish edge?”

“That’s right.”

“Whatever this table is, it keeps shifting, but that thing remains still.”

“When you are ready, you put both your palms down in the center of that outline. The device will do the rest, capturing and storing whatever you experience.”

Simon cleared his throat. “Do you think we Scholars might be let loose to explore the Study?”

John nodded and the three left. But Anita returned a moment later and took both of Lilly’s hands in hers. Lilly tried not to flinch as pain shot through her arm.

“Dear one, you and I need to talk, perhaps not now, but soon. You need to let me in, okay?”

Lilly took a deep breath and looked up into the woman’s bright and beautiful green eyes. “Okay. You’re right. I think it’s probably time.”

The woman clasped Lilly’s face and lifted her chin. “Remember, Lilly, you are here because of who you are. Now, let me practice my hugs, and then I will join the others. We will be ready for whatever you might need.”

They hugged and Anita left. A moment later, Lilly heard her fuss with the knob on the locked door—on purpose and as loudly as possible. Anita’s little statement of solidarity made her grin.

John also heard it and unsuccessfully tried to look disapproving.

“Should I do it now?” Lilly asked.

“I don’t think anything will happen. You have to actually witness something in the Chamber of Witness in order to record it here.”

For an instant Lilly hesitated, thinking about her dreams and hallucinations. But just as quickly she dismissed them.

Lilly placed her hands on the table’s surface inside the red outline. For a brief moment everything seemed to slow down. Then it slowed again, almost to a stop. She saw John lifting up his hands, shock plastered on his face. And for a moment she could hear his drawn out and slowing shout of “
Wa-a-a-i-i-i-t!
”

Then everything went black.

L
illy
floated, weightless. At first she fought the familiar oily thickness that overwhelmed and embraced her at the same time, especially as it slipped into her mouth. As before, breathing this slick sludge swept her to the brink of terror. Fluid filled her lungs.

But she adapted quicker, knowing she would not suffocate. Eyes open, seeing nothing, she relaxed into the drift. Soon, an underlying peace emerged. Lilly knew where she was and remembered what she had done. In the Records Room with John, she had placed her hands on the table.

The spewing detonation was instantaneous and continuous, not only overwhelming light expressing force and information with all its shades and hues but also expanding sound and universal song. First a brilliant but not blinding inspiration, then exhalation of ecstasy and wonder, unhindered and held within consuming fire, a
rush of wind and water: the culmination of Almighty Voice thrusting into other-centered union.

Behemoth of matter squared off against leviathan of chaos, sending sparks of play and power outward, creating space, energy, and time. These were attended to and applauded by graceful spirit beings whose inhibited elation scattered like far-flung beads of perspiration, scintillating jewels, spun out and up and in. It was an overpowering, discordant riot, an overwhelming cacophony as harmony wrapped itself around a central melody.

It was all happening again. Lilly was reliving Creation’s first explosion, and the crafting of the womb in which God would form Man. But now she knew why she was here: to witness the Ages within Beginnings. There was no going back and no way to stop, so she rested into it, to feel, experience, and know it, allowing the cosmic surge to pick her up and carry her on its crest.

Lilly wasn’t there to understand or measure or set limits but to hear and see and feel in the simplicity of bearing witness. How could she comprehend light, energy, spirit beings, and layered wrinkles formed between force and matter? How could she wrap her mind around the mysteries of quantum strings and quarks and multiple dimensions? She couldn’t, and it didn’t matter. But what Lilly knew beyond all doubt was that the focus of communal Love was settled on one tiny, secluded, precisely constructed planet tucked inside the rim of a spiral galaxy.

Lilly moved closer as the potter’s wheel spun out the clay into a rippling space. A violent stranger with a fiery tail gouged out a cavernous wound. The moon broke off but couldn’t run away, held in place by the grasp of spinning earth’s gravitational affection.

Now the Witness stood upon the shell of the new world, a formless empty wasteland enshrouded in a canopy of dust—star wreckage and gases. Lilly couldn’t see but heard and felt the slow-pulsating wings of the hovering Spirit, and the shouts of attending Angels who proclaimed Her name with every beat:
Ruach! Ruach! Ruach!
The Spirit blew away debris to let light from the nearest star penetrate the surface’s chaotic turmoil.

Evening turned to morning, and it was Good.

The fiery Joy of God pushed apart the churning matter, an opening invitation for atmospheric gatherings as sunbirthed warmth and swirling dust-laden moisture played upon Lilly’s upturned face and outstretched hands. The first day’s penetrating light had probed the liquid deep, awakening new songs within its swirling depths. Lilly watched transfixed as a finely tuned and synchronized living dance responded to the melody, biomass and diversity rejoicing in a harmony of purpose, as evening turned to morning, and it was Good.

Earth trembled. Its crust buckled. Volcanoes raged in tectonic praise with hands of silicate reaching skyward. The land emerged and, cooling, clothed itself in vegetation’s cover. With isotopic, photosynthetic, eukaryotic flourish, the Artist splashed across the earth’s broad canvas a stunning layered landscape.

The Spirit frolicked like a child, abandoned to the Father’s Love. Within the very being of Eternal Man, She finger-painted uninhibited design. Inspiration, inhalation, exhalation, exaltation! Evening turned to morning, and it was Good.

Lilly could see out to the starry host. The moon lit up the night, surrounded by countless attending stars. Daylight scrubbed away the thick clouds of shadow dust, transforming Earth’s skies from translucent to transparent. The lights that God had blasted into being now hung visible and waiting. The stage was set by the Playwright, and with the audience expectant, evening turned to morning, and it was Good.

The sea swarmed, stirring up all that once was fragile. Out of this soup swam fins and gills and squirting things, and colossal sharp-toothed killers in search of their next meal. Then the land gave itself to the creeping and the crawling, a vast army that prepared the soil and air. They joined their Creator in constructing the world as evening turned to morning, and it was Good.

The
nephesh,
soulish creatures, along with an array of other living things, emerged from oceans and from lands, the panoply of
crafted kinds diverse in form and feature. Lilly was awestruck by their simple beauty and design in tooth and nail, in claw and bone and feather.

Another shout of elation thundered through the universe like a million instruments within a single room. “The appointed time is now! Come gather!”

As evening ascended, the entire cosmos drew near, dancing lights and nimble beings, hastening toward the Holy Voice.

Lilly stood once more on the hill looking over a vast and circular plateau. Behind it, Eden’s boundary rose like praise from the earth into the sky.

“Astounding!” came a singsong voice above her. Lilly glanced and jumped back a step. At eye level was the top of a sandaled foot. She looked up—way up—into a gigantic smile. He or she was resting on one knee, an elbow across the other.

“Do not be afraid.” Then the being disintegrated like exploding fireflies, only to materialize again in a shape about her height.

“Size is relative,” it declared in melodic tones. “Are you the Witness?”

Lilly felt confused. “Where’s Eve?”

“Eve? That word has no meaning for me.”

“Eve! You know, the Mother of the Living.”

The being laughed as if a sweet melody tumbled from its lips. “That is a wonderful new name for God!”

Lilly looked around again to ascertain where she was, then returned her attention to the smiling being. “Really? You don’t know Eve? Who are you?”

“My name,” it sang, “is Han-el, and I am at your service.”

“Han-el?” Lilly exclaimed. “John’s Guardian?”

Another burst of laughter. “I am certainly not a Guardian. I am a simple Messenger and Singer.” It paused. “John?”

Lilly lifted her hand to indicate that she needed a moment to process. Han-el reached out and touched her fingers, sending a familiar tingling surge throughout her body, everywhere except into the arm that had been infected.

She stepped back from the Messenger.

“How is it that you don’t know Eve or John, but you know that I’m a Witness?”

“Adonai announced that a Witness would be here. I, Han-el, have the honor of attending you.”

“Adonai announced?” None of this was what she had expected.

“He said your presence is a treasured anomaly and ambiguity, and He is especially fond of you!”

“He did?” Lilly could again feel the war within, the conflict of attraction and repulsion. “An anomaly? Then you know I don’t belong here.”

“And yet here you are!” Han-el sang.

Tentatively, Lilly reached out her hand to touch the being, but it went right through it. “You aren’t real.”

Han-el laughed again. “If my existence depended on your perceiving or touching me, then so too would love and hope and faith and joy and a vast array of other Invisibles. I am a spirit being. Perhaps
you
are the one who is not real?”

Lilly carefully crossed her arms and could feel her heart’s anxious thumping. Why was this different than when she was with Eve? If this was what the Vault was recording, did it mean she could still stop Adam? Was that why Eve had come to her before the actual witnessing?
This has happened only once . . .

And then she knew. It hit her like a lightning bolt that left her doubt dismantled. She had been summoned here to witness the highest point of God’s Creation. Eve was absent because she would be formed inside Man, and Lilly was here to witness their birth.

“I am real enough,” she said. “My name is Lilly, and I am the Witness.”

“The time is now!” cried Thunder Song, and the announcement transported Lilly to the center of the gathering. She was surrounded by light-beings and an onslaught to the senses. Music came from everywhere with wondrous scents and shifting light, forming a fluid tapestry. The strings of myrrh and sandalwood rose on ocean breezes. The horns of frankincense and fruits joined the songs of distant stars. Woodwinds exhaled hyacinth, pine, lilac, lavender, and honeysuckle in time with the rhythmic beats of spice—cinnamon and clove, turmeric and ginger.

Once gathered, creation did not wait long. A doorway majestically opened in Eden’s wall, and radiance tumbled out.

“They come.” Lilly heard Han-el close by but could only stare at the approaching blaze. It was a whirlwind of fierce reds and animated greens, set in the brilliance of spinning jasper, coalescing until from its center a single personage emerged . . . a human being.

“Eternal Man,” she whispered. “Everlasting God! Adonai!”

Lilly was entranced; every part of her longed to run to Him and tell Him all her secrets, to be remade, to melt into his magnificence, to find rest from her shame. Here stood trustworthiness.
Smiling welcome, He lifted hands, and the prostrate rose to kneeling.