“When the gods, before there were men,

  Worked and shed their sweat,

  The sweat of the gods was great,

  The work was dire, distress abiding.

  Carping, backbiting,

  Grumbling in the quarries,

  They broke their tools,

  Broke their spades

  And hoes…

  Nusku woke his lord,

  Got him out of bed,

  ‘My lord, Enil, your temple wall is breached,

  Battle broaches your gate.’

  Enil spoke to Anu, the warrior.

  ‘Summon a single god and make sure he’s

  put to death.’

  Anu gaped

  And then spoke to the other gods, his brothers.

  ‘Why pick on us?

  Our work is dire, our distress abiding.

  Since Belet-ili, the birth goddess, is nearby,

  Why not get her to create Lullu, the man.

  Let Lullu wear the yoke wrought by

  Enil.

  Let man shed his sweat for the gods.’”

  “Maybe that’s where he’s a lulu comes from,” she said, laughing.

  “That’s good,” he said. “Damned good. I guess we’re a couple of lulus.”

  A week later they were sitting in the sunroom parlour having a glass of dry vermouth. There had been a heavy pounding rain during the night and it was still raining. The garden walk was covered with white petals pasted to the flagstone. He should have noticed that Kate was growing thin, eating only green salads, Emmenthal cheese, and dry toast. At first, sipping her vermouth, she’d grown giddy, and then, as if sapped of all energy, she said, “I’d love to be sitting somewhere down south in the hot sun.” He turned to her and said, “But you’ve never liked the sun.” She was sitting in a heavily cushioned wicker chair with her eyes closed. He touched her hand. She didn’t open her eyes. He went back to reading Conrad, a novel, An Outcast of the Islands. Suddenly he stood up, staring into the stooping branches of the apple tree, bent by the weight of the pouring rain, and then, just as abruptly, he sat down.

  “Listen to this,” he said: “‘There is always one thing the ignorant man knows, and that thing is the only thing worth knowing; it fills the ignorant man’s universe. He knows all about himself…’”

  Willard dropped the book.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, opening her eyes.

  “Can’t you see?”

  “See what?”

  “If I seem to know so much about everything, maybe that’s only a kind of ignorance. Maybe I don’t know anything about myself.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said sternly.

  “Silly?” he said. “I’m deadly serious.”

  He sat staring out the window, into the downpour as tulip petals in the garden broke and fell. He stared at the headless stems. She rose and went upstairs and took a hot bath. She lay in the water a long time, slipping in and out of sleep, until she realized the water was cold and she was shivering. When she came back downstairs he was still sitting by the window, facing the drenched garden.

  “Willard, for God’s sake, what’s the matter? You’ve hardly moved for hours and hours.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s a kind of dread, or something like that. A dread…”

  “It’s silence, that’s what it is.”

  “I suppose it is. The vast silence. Maybe we live in silence forever. Maybe when we die that’s all we are to hear. Silence. The word is dead. Maybe that is what hell is.”

  The next morning she didn’t get out of bed. He brought her tea, but she only drank half the cup. “Perhaps it’s a touch of flu,” she said, but she had no temperature and no head-ache. Her hands were cold. He sat holding and rubbing her hands. She smiled wanly. “Oh, I missed our good talks yesterday,” she said.

  “It was only a pause,” he said, trying to be cheerful.

  “That’s right,” she said, and she closed her eyes.

  “It was a hard day on the garden, too,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “All this dampness, it’s not good, not healthy.”

  “No.”

  “It gets into the bones.”

  “Yes.”

  “Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones…” he sang, trying to be gay.

  “Dem dry bones…” she whispered.

  “Did you know, Kate,” he said, leaning close, seeing that she was drifting off into sleep, “that they’ve started digging near to where most people think the garden of Eden was, and there’s an actual town that was there around 6000 BC? And that’s a fact,” he said, wagging his finger at her as she lay with her eyes closed, “because there are so many ways of dating things now, what with carbon 14 and tree rings, dendrochronology they call it, when they cut across a tree and read the rings. And then of course they match it with an older tree, and that tree with an older tree, all the way back to the bristlecone pine, 5,000 years ago, in fact even longer. And then…”

  She was sound asleep, smiling in her sleep. Her smile bewildered him. He had never seen her smile in her sleep. He wondered what secret happiness, found in sleep, had made her smile.

  One week later she was taken to hospital. She had a private room and a young doctor who spoke in a hushed monotone with his hands crossed inside the sleeves of his smock. “It’s a problem of circulation,” he said. “The blood’s just not getting around.”

  “Oh dear,” Willard said, and sat in the bedside leather easy chair all day and into the early evening until Kate woke up and said, “You shouldn’t stay here all this time.”

  “Where else should I be?”

  The day she died, her feet and lower legs were blue from gangrene. And in great pain she’d quickly grown thin, the skin taut on her nose, her eyes silvered by a dull film. She panted for air, rolling her eyes. “Willard, Willard,” she whispered and reached for him.

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Talk to me.”

  “Yes, Kate.”

  “There. Talk to me there.”

  “Where is there?” he asked desperately.

  After her cremation, to which only a few old scholars came and none of his former students, Willard wandered from room to room in the house talking out loud. He kept calling her name, as if she might suddenly step in from the garden, smiling, her hands dirty from planting. In the late afternoons he sat by the open parlour window, talking and reading and gesturing. But then early one evening he got confused and said, “What did I say?” He couldn’t remember what he had said, and when Kate did not answer, the dread that he’d felt the month before, the fear that the hollow he’d so easily accepted was really a profound unawareness of himself, seized him in the chest and throat so that he was left breathless and thought he was going to choke. He was so afraid, so stricken by his utter aloneness, that he began to shake uncontrollably. He sat staring at her empty chair, ashamed of his trembling hands. He was sure he heard wolves calling and wondered if he was going crazy. He decided to get out for some air, to go down to the footbridge that crossed over the ravine and then come back.

  Later that week, Willard went for a long walk in the downtown streets, along streets that they had walked, but he couldn’t bring himself to go into the lunch counter. All the faces reflected in the store windows as he passed made his mind swirl, but when he stepped through the subway turnstiles, to the thunk of the aluminum bars turning over, he told Kate out loud and as clearly as he could that he was now absolutely sure, as he had promised her, that he was on to something big, a simple truth, so simple that no one he knew had seen it, and the truth was that all the great myths were based on lies. He’d actually been thinking, he’d said to her during the short cremation procedure, that to live a great truth, it is probably necessary to live a great lie. “After all,” he said excitedly, as he stepped through the last turnstile, “the Jews were never in Egypt. There was no Exodus. The Egyptians were fanatical record keepers and the Jews are never mentioned, and the cities that the Jews said they built, they did not exist. They were not there. There was no parting of the sea, no forty years of wandering in the desert… I mean, my God,” he said, shaking his long finger as he forgot where he was going and didn’t see that people were staring at him as he went back down an escalator, “what does anyone think Moses was doing out there for forty years? Forty years. You can walk across the Sinai in two days. And Jericho, there was no battle. No battle took place because there were no great walls to tumble down. There was no city there back then, not at that time,” and he threw up his arms, full of angry defiance, standing on the tiled and dimly lit platform of the St. George subway station.

  “Sorry,” Willard said to a cluster of women who were staring at him, “I’m very sorry.” He hurried back to the escalator, travelling up the moving stairs, craning his neck, eager to get out into the sunlight. “I just don’t know what I’m going to do, Kate,” he said in a whisper. “Talking to you like this, I forget. It’s so fine, I just plain forget, people looking at me as if I were some kind of loony.”

  It was painful for him to stay at home all day. He kept listening for her voice in the rooms, embarrassed by the sound of his own voice. He sank into grim, bewildered silence, sometimes standing in the hall in a trance, a stupor, certain that he was losing his mind. Sometimes he slept during the day and once dreamed that he was walking on his shadow, as if his shadow was always in front of him, a shadow made of soot. It whimpered with pain. He stomped on his shadow till he was out of breath. He was afraid it was the soot of a scorched body. He heard her voice, and saw her sitting with her elbow on the windowsill, picking old paint off a glass pane. She was feverish and kept calling for ice. “Ice is the only answer.” He woke up terrified. He locked their bedroom door and made his bed on the sofa in the library. For a week he slept on the sofa, drinking several glasses of port, trying to get to sleep. He could see from the sofa a hem of light under the bedroom door. He’d left the light on, a bedside reading lamp that she’d given him for his birthday, a porcelain angel with folded wings. On two evenings he was sure that he heard her voice in the bedroom, a voice so muffled that he couldn’t make out the words. Then one night while he was keeping watch on the hem of light, half tipsy, half asleep, it went out. He was panic-stricken. He took it as a sign that she was in trouble, that she was really going to die, and he fumbled with the old key, trying to get it into the lock, whispering. “Hold on Kate, hold on, I’m coming,” cursing his own stupidity and cowardness for trying to close off the bedroom. Willard felt ashamed, as if he had betrayed her. When he got into the room, breathing heavily, he discovered that the bulb in the lamp, left on for so long, had burned out. He had seldom cried before, and only once in front of her. Now, standing before her dressing-table mirror, he discovered that he was dishevelled and haggard and he was crying. He began to sing as cheerfully as he could:

  If I had the wings of an angel,

  over these prison walls I would fly,

  I’d fly to the arms of my poor darling,

  and there…

  He moved close to himself in the mirror and curled his lip with contempt. “You’re a coward,” he said, and then lay down and fell asleep on their bed. In the morning he dressed with care, putting on an expensive Egyptian-cotton shirt and camel-hair jacket. He went out into the bright noon hour and found he was relieved to be walking again with a sudden jaunt in his stride, downtown among the crowds. He began to sing: I’ll take you home again, Kathleen… But then he grew suddenly wary and stopped singing, trying to make sure he heard himself before he spoke out loud. He kept looking for himself in store windows to see if he was singing or talking at the top of his voice.

  In the Hudson’s Bay underground shopping mall, he came to a halt so abruptly that an old woman was unable to avoid bumping into him, and spilled her bag of toiletries. He didn’t notice. He stared at a portly black man standing by the checkout counter. The black man was talking into a cellphone, and farther along the mall, another man had a cellular phone close to his cheek. Willard realized that for weeks he’d seen people all over the city talking and nodding into phones and no one paid any attention to them. “Nobody knows who they’re talking to,” he cried. “Maybe they’re not talking to anyone,” and the old woman, picking up her rolls of Downy Soft toilet paper scattered around his feet, looked up and said, “You’re not only rude, you’re crazy,” but he hurried off.

  At Rogers Sound Systems a young salesman, with a Jamai-can accent Willard had trouble understanding, tried to interest him in the latest models of cellphones. Willard was surprised at how compact the phones were. When the salesman said, “Look, this one even has its own built-in flashlight,” Willard said, “A phone is a phone. How complicated can that be?” The salesman shrugged. “In that case, we have older models on sale, half price.”

  Willard bought one of the sale-price models. When the salesman tried to advise him, saying, “About all those old-fangled buttons, man—” Willard cut him short with, “Never mind. I think I can figure out a phone.” He strode out of the store and set out for home, eager to get talking to Kate.

  As soon as he got to the footbridge he tapped a green button and, holding the phone close to his ear like an old walkie-talkie, began telling Kate an old joke he’d heard years ago: “How these two old ladies had promised each other that the first one to die would come back and tell the other what Heaven was like, so after Sadie died Sophie waited and waited, and just when she gave up, Sadie appeared in a halo of light and Sophie said, You came back, so what’s it like? And Sadie said, You get up in the morning and eat and then you have sex, and then it’s sex before breakfast and afterwards sex, and before lunch and then lunch and more sex and sex before a snack before goodnight and then sex, and Sophie said, Sadie… Sadie, this is Heaven! But Sadie said: Heaven, who’s in heaven. I’m a rabbit in Wisconsin.” He laughed and laughed but with the phone tucked against his cheek, so that no one paid any attention to him. “Oh, I’m in fine fettle,” he said. “This walking clears the lungs.”

  Willard stood on the footbridge over the ravine. He had never stopped to look down into the ravine before. He’d always been in a hurry to get home, his head tucked into his shoulder against the wind. He was surprised at how deep the ravine actually was, and how dense and lush the trees and bush were. The city itself was flat, all the streets laid out in a severe military grid, but here was the ravine, and of course there were ravines like this one that ran all through the city, deep, dark, mysterious places, running like lush green wounds through the concrete, the cement surfaces, and he felt sheepish. “All these years, and I’ve never been down in the ravines. Who knows what goes on down there. Can you imagine that, Kate?” He began to walk slowly home. He looked up and down the street. “All this is beginning to trouble me. Everything’s beginning to trouble me,” he said. “Everything seems to be only the surface of things. Everything is not where it’s supposed to be. I mean, Abraham was always Abraham, some kind of old desert chieftain from around the River Jordan, but that’s probably not true. All the actual references that I can find say he lived in Heran, in Anatolia, and that’s a place in southern Turkey, close to where Genesis says Noah’s ark ended up, settled on Mount Ararat, and that’s not in Jordan, that’s in eastern Turkey. The whole thing seems more and more like a Turkish story, a Turkish delight,” and he laughed and quickened his pace, “because Abraham’s descendent, a man called Dodanim, became the Dodecanese Islands, and a guy named Kittim is really Kriti, which is Crete, and Javan is really the Aegean, and Ashkenaz… Everyone knows the Ashkenazi are from north of the Danube. The whole thing, the whole story, took place somewhere else farther north. It’s not a desert story at all, that’s why the Jews weren’t seen in Egypt…they weren’t there, they were out on the edge of the world.”

  He was so out of breath from talking and walking at the same time that he had to stop walking. He had a cramp in his wrist from clutching the cellphone to his cheek. He was relieved. There was no one on his street of tree-shaded homes. He put the phone in his jacket pocket. Then he suddenly shuddered and choked back tears. All his talk, he felt, was wasted. He was alone. He was alone in a well of silence. “Jesus,” he said, “even Sadie came back and said something.” He felt abandoned, he wanted to hear what Kate thought of all his talk, all his daring insights. A man coming around the corner with his dog on a leash hesitated because Willard looked so frantic, but Willard shouted, “And a good day to you.” The man hurried on.

  Around noon on Easter Sunday, Willard put on a lightweight tweed suit that he hadn’t worn for years. He went across the footbridge and strode along Bloor Street, revelling in the strong sunlight. He hadn’t been out of the house for days because he’d been working in his study on several cuneiform texts. He’d hardly eaten. He’d done very little talking to Kate, but now he felt fresh and bold and self-confident as he walked among well-dressed women.

  “It’s a wonderful day” he said to Kate, holding the phone close. “And I’ve got wonderful news. I’ve finally figured this thing out, yes ma’am… The answer’s right there in what looks like a contradiction that’s built in at the beginning, right there at the start of Genesis, where God says he’s made man in his own image, and then, in the second chapter, there’s no one around. Everything’s empty. So whoever he’d made has flown the coop.”

  As the red light changed to green at Church Street, he stepped off the curb, saying, “The whole place is empty, man is gone and what that means is that for nearly a million years, man trekked around chasing animals, naming them, hunting them, but suddenly he got smart. Ten thousand years ago he got smart. He wanted a garden. And a closed garden is something you’ve got to cultivate. And man shows up in Genesis again, and he was Cain the cultivator, who’d taken off from the old happy grazing grounds of Eden to work the earth in a new place, the new civilization where there was nothing. That’s what the new Eden was, not a paradise of two witless souls lying around under an apple tree, but Cain, the tattooed man who had the courage to build a closed garden, a city out there on the edge of the world. Cain the civilized man, the marked man…” and Willard raised his arms, facing into the sun. The women in their Easter outfits shied away from him. “That’s when man became magnificent, Kate. That’s when he went into the dark to create his own world, to create himself. That’s the first time he had the guts to take his own word for everything.”