The Fall

In the beginning, God created the universe; the earth was formless and desolate. –Genesis 1.1-2 1

There is a girl sitting by a window in a tall house, three years older than when she sat there last. Since then she has been coated in chocolatey cynicism, which is like a drug and more addictive than most; the distinctive malodour of decay surrounds her, radiating from every pore. It hangs in the air, tainting everything grey in her mind; the rainbow splice of light refracting from the wind chimes over her head is translated mentally to dull slate. That acrid tang of pessimism is weaker, however, than the robust aroma of self-hatred, a festering disease that has eaten away at her since the Dreamtime which nobody now speaks of and which may never have happened.
She is too innocent; if perception defines reality then perception is reality, but a mind hell-bent on filing the universe has found a new victim and turned in on itself. Every emotion has become merely a symptom, every thought must be carefully examined for signs of psychosis, and she never once wonders who is examining what.2

Three years ago Eve sat at the same spot, one which she has not trusted herself to return to since, fearing that fantasy would overwhelm her; today she wishes it would.
That morning had been so much brighter.3

…The Spirit of God was moving over the water. Then God commanded ‘Let there be light!’ and there was light. –Genesis 1.2-3 4

In Palestine at daybreak the guns had stilled in surprise and some dull fear, matching that famous Western truce of 1914; in Darfur it became too much for the most macabre butchers to face the new two-fold agony at their hands. Hours later, the flock wheeling across her city skyline and the gift of her Christmas Island bird brought the strange new world to millions more as apricot dawn softly encircled the globe.
Peculiar unity bound them together; the shared experience of six and a half billion minds which, upon waking, were presented with the impossible.5

It was a new Empire for the disenfranchised, a new lease of life for a day that could be elongated for free with a little imagination. They spent that day, the Dreamtime, with companions in tow; they marched two by two down every street and every path, and even when they awoke the next morning to see that the grey had returned to bleach the sunrise ugly, with nothing more than a cooling dent on the pillowcase or a scuffed hoof-print in the garden to show what had happened – what had probably happened – what might have happened, yesterday… they did not forget.6

The Lord God said, ‘It is not good for man to live alone. I will make a suitable companion to help him.’ – Genesis 2.18 7

Head tilted to one side, He had gazed at her with eyes like drops of ink, the first thing she saw when she awoke. The eye contact was more than contact; rather than the usual light brush with someone else’s soul she looked through Him, and saw her self staring unmistakeably out of those dark eyes.8

A bird… there’s a bird in your room … Logic gabbled unheeded. She reached out a sleep-numbed hand, watching the bird watching her and trying to ignore the thoughts which rose unbidden in her head; a name, then a memory like a colour snapshot of herself, very young, in raptures of delight at the scenes her imagination painted, bold streaks that rested on top of the world and tinted it new colours. Among them always, the stripe of a bird – wren or kite, owl or gull, skimming around and through her extravagant creation.9

Tentative fingertips brushed against white feathers, light as the air but solid as granite.
“You’re not possible,” she said aloud, her voice quavering and losing surety.10

Either I am, and I’m here, or I’m not, and you’re mad . The bird’s head tipped to one side. Which would you prefer? Smugly, He plumped his wings and she reflected that although the voice was in her head, beaks being challenging things to talk with, it didn’t sound like the voice of madness. It sounded… it sounded like her .11

Her landlord, a gaunt, sensitive man, who would have been plump and comedic were it not for the house fire that had gently singed away the sharp edge of his mind and stolen a wife and child on filthy thieving winds of burnt sugar and bubbling plastic, had awoken that morning to the vivid personification of his endurance and fortitude; a wild ass whose sorrowing eyes brimmed with the tears he could not cry. He had accepted the bond between them gratefully in that first awakening glance when his brown irises matched hers in some indefinable way.12

Eve remembered, hands toying automatically with a biro on the desk, how she had walked downstairs in a dream to see the twin figures, one familiar as the house around her and one indefinably both alien and well-known, like a new coat of paint on an old wall. 13

The landlord and his companion had turned briefly from their silent communion to watch with patient, uninterested eyes as she left the house, her feet shuffling on the gravel path like those of a bandaged invalid, His white wings beating the air more confidently with each second. They were Alice and the White Bird, stopwatch not included, and he’d taken his place above the silver city once more as she revelled in him, in the feeling of being him and of having her safe cocoon of bitter logic blown to shards, crystal eggshells from a mind newly awakened to the ever-shifting possibilities offered by the ever-impossible world. Butterfly colours healed the grey and she emerged with His new confidence.14

On the desk, her reading had lain briefly forsaken. A constant quest for knowledge habitually built tenuous bridges of self-deception over the lonely shrieking chasms in her heart, and pages 77-120 fluttered complicated diagrams of isotopes and radioactive decay at the breeze stealing in through the open window. Until the last pale streams of dusklight sank below the horizon, she’d watched His revelling flight, a dream wrapped up in a dream.15

Then God commanded ‘Let the water be filled with many kinds of living beings, and the sky filled with birds’. – Genesis 1.20 16

It had always helped her, before, to know the exact properties of a loveless glance and to remind herself just how fleeting they were, brief imprints in the sand of consciousness wiped clean by a swiftly incoming tide almost before the sole departed.
Yet when she watched the white bird swoop and soar and shine bright in the morning’s cool shimmer, the knowledge rang a hollow note. The colours she were seeing did not, in any real way, exist; different wavelengths of light reflected off endless surfaces and were simply interpreted by her brain in a convenient way. That this certainty did not detract one iota from her joy in the burnished gold underbelly and wingtips streaked with stylised black was unsettling17

The Dreamtime need not be recounted in detail; it was shrouded in a haze of mental wonder that would not recede, diaphanous like the filmy mist around a rainbow that partially shields it from view. When photographs are exposed to too much light, they fade quickly, and the memory of that sunlit time could not be preserved enough.18

‘You may eat the fruit of any tree in the garden except the tree that gives knowledge of what is good and what is bad. You must not eat the fruit of that tree; if you do you will die the same day.’ Genesis 2.16-17 19

It was like a man who had suffered from short sightedness all his days putting on his first pair of glasses at the age of eighty; the world came into focus and although its clarity later drifted away on the current, the Dreamtime goes on in a day that lasted a lifetime. Looking up at the sky is enough for gossamer threads of thought to knit themselves together for one tight second, so that the memory of His swoop is so vivid that it is as though that one day is endlessly replaying, the backing track to her life beating in time with her heart. Other times there is nothing, but she resists the temptation to simply imagine His flight, to create the thought of Him where her eyes tell her doubtlessly He is not.20

The landlord told Eve calmly the next morning that he could still see her, the wild donkey Mithusaleh, that she still spoke to him from somewhere; and he only shrugged sadly when his lodger angrily told him that they were gone, the creatures, they were out of reach, that incorporeal meant nonexistent and that nothing had happened yesterday because it couldn’t have; it was a gas leak, a government conspiracy, a dream, a mass hallucination… For Eve the great sadness of His loss, the rip which brutally tore the tidy stitches in her heart and left a bloody confused mess, could not be tempered by self-indulgent imaginings. 21

Afterwards, she called the nameless beings demons – and He was hers, her own private demon providing entry to her own private hell; two fast track tickets, no queue. Even to have a name for them, even to refer to the fictional things that for one day had seemed so vividly real, was painful to her; but then she argued with herself (and the almost-heard echoes of His voice giving the other side of the debate in a way that stank so strongly of her own mind, polarised, made her stomach wrench away and left her standing over white porcelain and biting through the tears of her own imperfection) that atheism was meaningless without established religion to confound with it.22

The first reality of them could not be denied long; she eventually acknowledges their spark-like existence, one day of flaring light in the universe, but she cannot accept that a day could endure for ever.23

Others negotiate their own compromises with reality and recognise the familiar voice inside, some openly, some privately, but most don’t feel the need to brag about something they shared with the whole of humanity.24

When an eminent scientist speaks openly of his migratory demon, a bird not dissimilar to her own, she wants to howl with grief and fury, because no-one recognises her strength , her resistance of creeping Temptation; they fete their weakness and flaunt it in carnivals, they research their fantasy ‘souls’ and sell them to wishful thinking, prostituting logic and sense with abandon.25

The woman saw how beautiful the tree was and how good its fruit would be to eat, and she thought how wonderful it would be to become wise. - Genesis 3.6 26

She searches their faces for recognition or acknowledgment of her intelligence and wisdom and meets only stylised Picasso-looks with perhaps some fleeting emotion (usually the pity she does not need) and it isolates her further until she retreats to the last fortress, abandoned remnant of a lost empire when worlds fell before her critical analysis and conquered thoughts were tallied two by two. It is lonely in the centre of the red desert, where bitter rocks press against the thin soil like the spine of an emaciated creature erupting painfully through flesh. Finally she has space to think, wandering through empty rooms and watching echoes of her self flit past, transparent locusts with humming wings.27

For a moment she sees Him, sleek white, black and gold plumage flawlessly real in the dimming western glow. To Eve, though, light particles have weighty importance; she will allow her eyes to see nothing that is not materially present, and the phantasm flickers its bird wings, disappearing with one last mournful gaze. The voice is harder to dispel and it lurks in the flip-side of her every thought. She hears it despite the fact that her ears report tomb-silence and the molecules of the atmosphere fail to vibrate to its sound; but as a good scholar she knows instinctively about the impossible, and this is it.28

Of course, it is anything but self-destruction.29

Thinking of her sojourn in the fortress as merely a pause in the fight to gather troops she waits an eternity of three years for never-coming recruits to arrive, observing the planets’ eternal dance with equanimity until something snaps inside. Resembling a puppet with slashed strings she slumps down, having recognised that they were right, the people with illegible faces, they were right and she was wrong, because He is everywhere, a part of her, nothing but a normal side effect of her imperfect human brain with its organic flaws. She needs Him in order to be herself because He is herself, only together can they make her, and this bloody single-mindedness that she has fought for is an empty victory because by cutting Him away she has destroyed herself, devastated the capacity for thought and inner debate that made her a scholar, a teacher, one of the knowledgeable few who understood or claim to understand life’s eccentric concentric circles.30

Surveying the battlefield, she searches for enemy survivors, a flash of white and gold, but drizzling rain has washed the colour away and she has somehow been teaching herself not to think rather than forcibly tutoring her mind in the ways of logic. Though she listens for the dingo’s howl and for the scavengers to come and clear the bodies out of sight she knows that she will only be satisfied when her split mind is whole again and so she is here today, where she watched Him fly, embodiment of all the potential she has squandered with obsession’s wanton wastefulness. 31

The sun’s face sagging into its collar, she raises herself onto the window ledge and feels the breeze hit her face in protest, hundreds of tiny hands pushing and imploring her to go back inside.32

Too late. She leaps and spreads her arms, eyes to the sun, sight burning away and she embraces the flames that crackle along the edge of reality, watches in detachment as the Real World fades, mind-eyes flickering from side to side, searching for the glint of white and gold that can transform her arms to wings because he must be somewhere, she cannot be the only one alone in all the universe, the only one without recourse, without a mental Court of Appeal, without a second thought to follow every first. Even as she strides into the pulsating red desert knowing she cannot survive, as she surrenders unconditionally, dancing as she slips down the far side of madness where her thoughts are whipped away by the rushing wind almost before they have a chance to form, she cannot have driven away her humanity entirely, cannot have lost Him no matter how hard she tried. 33

The people in the street stare, the whispering transient voices in their heads articulating unspoken thoughts almost of glee at such a spectacle while their lips mouth affectations of sorrow for the girl who defied them all, who made them feel stupid and cloth-headed and childish. Did it matter whether they were right or wrong if they were happy, at peace with themselves, in balance? 34

Her body turns over as it hits the pavement, spine snapping loudly in one, two, three staccato places. It rolls bonelessly as it smashes onto concrete and thin white arms with clattering gold bracelets flap uselessly into the air for a moment before smacking down finally, slapping into a pool of cooling blood which lightly sprays the already dead face35

She fell - but for a moment wrapped in infinity They flew.