Gennesis

–An allegory

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

The same was in the beginning with God.

All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

In him was life; and the life was the light of men.

And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.”

* * *

It was all dark and crimson that pulsated around: pa-DUM. pa-DUM. And shadows, shadows so plenty you might think of them as everything, shadows so blurry you would find them to be nothing. There must be a fire behind me, for all I could see were red, and all I could feel was heat. And here I was, buried, in shadows eternally fleeting. I turned to chase one with my eyes, only to find myself chained to the waist.

So many shadows around me. So many shadows surrounded me. Shadows of untold stories, of an obelisk far in the west that sang the deeds of some ancient king. Shadow of the steeple of a chapel, somewhere in a New England academy, cast on its freshly-trimmed lawns. Shadows of the low walls of a canal city, where ships come and go but never stay. On those walls stood a shadowy being, gazing and whispering. And the most mysterious of all: the shadow of a mound-like monster of an edifice, its dome ablaze under the moon. Its shadow was reflected in the rusty river at its feet. Mesmerized, I reached out my hand to touch, only to realize everything was but a shadow.

The passion soon passed and I took a different approach with inquiry and reason. It took me a thousand years to name and study each shadow. It took me another thousand years to calculate their trajectories and measure their periods– that was fairly easy, since numbers, abstract as they are, have no shadows. Then I rested in perfect peace, content in the beautiful completeness of this world I was in, which I managed to model. That elysian joy only lasted for a single day, for a sense of fear slowly crept in like the turning shadow of a sundial– the fear that something was still incomplete and unmeasured. Then came a desperate search for another thousand years for me to finally realize what was incomplete. In this red world full of shadows, there was a shadowless being: me. I turned and twitched in my chains to look at my own shadow, with no avail. I stretched my head and sought the source of fire, yet it did not help. I rolled my eyes to look back at myself, yet my eyes were chained as well. Exhausted, I wondered what my shadow would look like.

I wondered who I am.

Since I couldn’t see myself, I might as well think of myself instead, breaking the limits of reason and re-introducing imagination, with shadows being my only guide. The pulsating source of heat within me, I named it “heart.” I imagined it to be the shadows of the endless waves that travel across the ocean and greet the sand untiringly. I imagined it to be the shadows of a pebble thrown into an unfound pond beneath a sacred grove, where circular shadows vibrate back and forth upon the rock bottom. The instrument through which I perceive the shadows, I named it “eyes.” It was the melancholic shadow at the edge of the purest crystals and quartzs, mixed with the dexterity of a falcon’s shadow as it swipes over the steppes across the horizon.

As the falcon swept across the steppes, its shadow eventually diminished into the shadows of the mountains far away, an edge that ripped and bit the landscape afar. To climb those shadows of the mountains, I would need long mobile parts stemming from myself, like how a tree’s shadow branches out from its trunk.I called these parts “limbs.” Another creation of mine is called “hands.” It is a flat piece of tissue with bony joints protruding out for gripping, with the lines of rivers and the edging shadows of ridges imprinted in miniscule detail.

In this way it took me another thousand years to imagine my own shadow and name them by words. The heart, the eyes, the ears, the senses and organs and limbs, each layer of skin, each pore, each wrinkle. It was an arduous yet aesthetic process: when I placed the two-hundred-ninety-six-thousand-three-hundred-and-fifth strand of hair, I imagined it to be the thin shadow of a scalpel blade, when the surgeon examined his instrument under the burning lights. The pore from which this hair stems out? It was the sheen of a drop of blood as it grew its stain on the surgeon’s cloak. And when it comes to the last piece of hair, I saw the spiky shadow of a pine, which stood beneath a pagoda in a country far in the orient. Then I knew I was complete. The silent winter snow fell and tapped the pine needle gently, as its dark shadow vibrated on the sacred whiteness below. I had to go.

There was only one problem: I was still chained to the waist. I had to use my imagined body to inch my way out, dragging away the heavy chain on my waist as I crawled each step out of my seat. There was a narrow leeway to the back, gurgling with a sanguine stream, which I then followed with heavy steps. Crawling on all fours, I squeezed and dived into the way (I should’ve imagined myself to be smaller!), which pressed on me in every direction... Breathe– Push! Breathe– Push! ... Breathe– Push! I struggled until the shadows dimmed my eyes with asphyxiation and then devoured me.

I passed out.

I did not know how much time had passed before my consciousness returned: perhaps a moment, perhaps another millenia. My consciousness returned in its most common way, in its most authentic and familiar form to me– in a dream. What shadow has not been dreamt of, I wonder? After I dreamt of everything beyond and everything within myself, what is still yet to be conceived?

And the revelation came. Just like I turned to my shadowless self, the shadow must turn to itself: I need to dream the antithesis of shadows. It must be something abstract, something active, something that cast and pour out and run and radiate rather than being projected. It must be clear and sharp with edges, painful to behold, instead of mild and blurry and temperate. Then, let it be the power, the source, the beginning. Let it be the origin, the salvation, the rebirth.

Let there be light, I said.

And there was light. And I saw light. A sparkle, a tiny pinhole, engulfed but never extinguished by the surrounding shadows. The antithesis.

And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

The light emerged, enlarged and intensified as I proceeded to struggle my way out of the dreadful descent. I followed the bloody Stygian stream, until the cave faded into a ravine and the ravine rushed into a canyon and the canyon expanded into broad plains– and blinding light cascaded down. My eyes, accustomed to shadows yet never enlightened, hurt as if they were pierced by a hairpin. I winced and wept by instinct, as I wheezed to breathe the fresh, cool breeze, so different from the humid subterranean miasma. Like a drowning sailor from a shipwreck, I was tossed onto the shores of light.

Suddenly a heavenly wind swept down and shattered the chain on my waist, the heavy chain that had bound me to the cave since time began. I was then lifted up. From the pure brightness and goodness above I heard a voice– the eudaimonia–

* * *

“It’s a girl!” The nurse proclaimed.

* * *

On that moonless night, many winters ago in the reign of Augustus, the lone star pierced darkness like a pinhole. Her water also broke, so both starlight and water ebbed in silence. Resting my palm on the age-worn wooden frame of the stable, I saw three foreign men coming from afar. The eldest one, bearded and bald, strangely seemed to be the strongest with his brawny shoulders and burly build. He came on a chariot and said in Greek that his name was “Broad.” An uncommon name. The second one, a man about thirty, looked ghastly and grievous. His tangled, curly brown hair draped down on his cut, tanned cheeks. He wore a plain flax robe and rode on a donkey. He said in Aramaic that his name was “Joshua.” Now that’s a name too common. The third one seemed to be in his fifties. Dressed in a well-tailored striped suit, he smoked a camel and said in some corrupted form of Latin that his name was “George of the Town.” Long name. I’ll call him Georgetown.

I ushered the three men into the dimly-lit stable and seated them on the haystacks in the corner. The elder two, Broad and Georgetown, seemed the more talkative of the trio; they conversed in Greek and Latin while Joshua sat quietly between them and held his head low. Yet their little banter soon silenced, as the three quickly set their eyes on the shadow of a woman, who lay in the opposite corner of the stable. The walls creaked as she clenched her fists on the cloak thrown on her, and groans came from her hard-bitten teeth. She was giving birth.

Mr. Broad was the first to break the silence.

“Lo, Mr. Town– the process of birth! Isn’t it like a man coming out of a cave?”

Georgetown said nothing, so Broad began to posit about his “cave,” a little allegory of his. I managed to pick up bits and pieces in his mumbled, excited monologue: a man sits in a cave, watching fleeting shadows projected by a fire, thus the common mind perceives worldly concepts. It needs to be enlightened, to be brought outside of the cave, to see the true form of things from which the shadows are derived. Finally, the man would see the sun, which shines light on everything and shows each of their forms to the human eye. He would recognize it as the ultimate goodness.

“Great allegory,” Georgetown asked, “Forgive me, yet you missed one thing: what is the nature of the cave, as in–” he took a breath from his cigarette, “how would the man perceive it? Let us assume our protagonist perceives it as another shadow; it must be so, since all things he sees are shadows; let it be an all-encompassing one, though.”

“That is very true,” Broad replied.

“Then–” Georgetown gave a puff, “when the man leaves the cave and sees the outer world, the ‘true’ world in your terminology, he must surely try to recognize something as the form of the cave, since he would have established connections between most shadows in the cave and most forms outside. He would’ve recognized that the shadow of a fish imitates the fish, et cetera.”

Georgetown cleared his throat before he threw the question back at Broad: “But what would the man think the true form of the cave to be?”

I looked at Joshua. Uninterested, he closed his eyes and held his peace.

“You got me,” Broad chuckled as his shadow twitched under the candlelight, “I was not ready for this question. Let’s hear it.”

“It is the furthest point of the sky, the edge of the horizon, the fabric of the night, that which contains everything, including…”

“The sun.” Broad slammed his broad forehead and gasped.

“... which you identify, in your little allegory, as the ultimate goodness.” Georgetown switched his legs and repositioned himself, content of bringing the shock to his companion. “So what is it? I say, ha, that the man never exits the cave, but only leaves from one into another, in which there is a brighter fire.”

The woman groaned again in distress, and the three reconvened their gazes to her corner.

“Out of the womb, into the stable, and then his house, his bedroom, and then the entire world under the dome of the night…” Georgetown spoke blandly, “For every step he takes, for every cave he exits, another cave awaits.”

The trio silenced and watched as the more heavy breathing and struggle came from the dark corner. Then there was the cry, and the silence broke.

* * *

I held the baby and yelled at the three men for help as the baby screamed in my arms. Yet no one responded, until the uninterested Joshua stood up. He picked up the baby– tiny, wrinkled and slimy– from my hands. With his bare, strong hands he tugged the umbilical cord and tore off the placenta from the baby’s belly.

And what happened next was so absurd, that I couldn’t comprehend it even to this day. It was horrible, but from their collective motion and resolution there birthed an eerie beauty. From the flickering lights I saw Joshua straightened his arms, gazed at the placenta and raised it high. Crimson blood wetted his hands, trickled down his wrists in lines and stained his flax robe, patches of rusty red rhododendrons blooming on a plain of white.

Broad and Georgetown were assisting too. Broad brought out a cup, and Georgetown a little plate. The utensils shined in the darkness, reflecting the flicker of the candle in a milder tone.

Joshua placed the cup on the table in front of him. Then, he clenched his fingers and tore at the placenta, broke it, and commanded the other two with a silent look. The blood oozed out of the placenta, skidded down his arms and dripped into the cup. He pinched the placenta for a little more to squeeze out all the blood, and laid it in the disk.

The two assisting old men reached their hands into the disk. They each took a piece of the placenta, no bigger than a piece of bread, with vessels crawling all over its surface and its heat still dissipating in this cold December night in a dim vapor.

They picked the flesh up to their mouths and took a bite, smearing the edges of their lips with redness. Then another. Then another. And the bloody-handed Joshua stood still and watched the two.

Then with his right hand, Joshua took the cup of blood– as I would later learn, the umbilical cord has the purest blood, untainted, connecting the creator and the creation. He again offered the cup to the sky, like what he did to the placenta. What passed felt like a millennia before he again commanded the other two with a silent look.

The two men bowed and leaned towards his cup, kissed it, and drank from it, until there was not a single drop left.

Then they sang a hymn and went out in the direction of the Mount of Olives, one riding a chariot, another riding a donkey, and the last one smoking a camel. I was too stunned to speak; I watched them slide silently into the desert under the lone star, as the woman collapsed in the corner, and the baby wailed and wailed.

I haven’t seen these placenta-eaters ever since. It is hard to point fingers at them and call them cannibals– is the placenta even a human organ? And who were those strangely-named, one from the east, one from here, and one from the west?

As I went off to clear the stable, I found their cup and the disk, spotted in blood, frigid. Weird enough, but a gift is a gift. Yet I was hoping for one more thing. As I watched the three walk into the darkness, I thought, will you name my child? I’m still waiting for them to come. Aranatha. Aranatha.

* * *

The nurse asked, “What will you name her?”

“Chris...tina. Christina…”

* * *

You do not need to know my name. Here’s what’s more important: my child does not have a father. Nor a grandfather, nor a great-grand father. I am mother and I am parent and here I am. My beloved, her father killed her. And I carried him, I carried his charred body, so I may save him. After all, maybe there is no birthgiver or murderer. Maybe there is but one life, shared, passed on, flipped, tumbled, gambled, among all of us.

In the first step we got several embryos alive and well. We could destroy them at this point, then publish a paper on Nature, and literally claim the next Nobel. Yet if we publish anything, her father would know we took his work. Honestly, we stole his work. Some day or another, we had to confront her father.

This could go wrong beyond every imaginable way. You ask, how would I recall the man? When I saw him in the department I always noticed the cusp of his tight lips, this grand inquisitor perhaps willing to sentence his savior to death again. My lover spoke of him as a lukewarm father yet a fervent believer. She complained how his calls always ended in prayers when he called her at the private boarding school. Would he hold his face tight at church?

“I don’t know how this would end,” she tried to maintain her calmness, “This secret that he has held on for years? Can I even expect any sanity from him once he knows?”

“But you’re his daughter, that must mean something right?” I interjected. This conversation needs some hope.

She bit her lips in a brief agony. “Sure, he probably would try to get me to protect this secret with him,” she gulped, “but I cannot, and I will not.”

“And to explain that you will have to come out to him.” I followed.

She closed her eyes and crossed her hands. Her head lowered, and thinking ensued. I watched her face in close detail, this face of which I have kissed every corner, its lines I have traced under the dim lights of dawn and dusk. I caressed her cheek, pale as usual, to offer her some comfort. She shook a little, but acquiesced into my palm.

Until she took my hand away in hers. “I have a plan.”

“I will show him our findings. As you have thought, he would ask me to keep it secret.” She said.

“Yeah, right.”

“We could keep it secret at an extra cost,” her eyes lit up and turned to me, “He must then accept me as who I am– and he must accept you as well. Think about it. We’re not gonna be celebrated, yet we will live free. And I am okay with that. It’s a win for us.”

My words failed me for a moment. “To blackmail your father? But what if this fails? What if he disagrees?” I was totally baffled.

“Then we leave him off and publish everything. Other colleges would go crazy to get us on board.”

“But what if he disowns you? And what if he wants to destroy everything, all that we have done?”

She squinted at me for a long minute until she spoke with resolution.

“Then there’s also a back-up plan. A plan for the worst. Are you willing?”

On the day before the catastrophe she came to me. She brought me to the lab, took an embryo in the catheter, and gave it to me. The next day she took all the material and went to see her father. She had not been back at eight. At nine. At ten. Every minute my anxiety burned until it evolved into doubt and doubt corrupted into fear and fear confirmed into despair. I set off to the Institute to look for her.

And I saw fire breaking out of the windows as I crossed the street, and I heard the boom. The splatter. The clatter of window panes falling onto the pavement.

The reality was beyond my worst fear.

I rushed towards the building. I called 911. I opened the door and plunged upstairs, only to find fire and debris enclosing what the lab used to be. In the fuming smoke was the operating table I lay upon yesterday, now engulfed in flames like an altar. On the altar was the sacrifice, burning, fuming. I tried to step in, only to sense some movement near my feet. I looked down: her father was crawling into the hallway, badly burnt, charred, bleeding.

We do carry and bury. Yet should I carry, or should I bury? Help me. Help me. Help me.

Then, as I recalled it, in the smoke and mist there was someone else. The texture of flax robes brushed my forearm. Perplexed, I turned only to find no one.

Then I heard a woman’s voice in the fire, calm as the midnight waters. “Let the dead bury their dead,” she said.

I chose to not listen and continued towards the operating table. Through the flames I could probably recognize a body. A corpus. Flesh, returned unto dust.

I heard the voice again.

“Let the dead bury their dead,” she calmly repeated, “Let the living carry their living ones.”

People do sometimes abandon women during catastrophes, sometimes purposefully, sometimes by tragedy, and more often they blame it on the woman herself. ​Y’all are obsessed with this. The biblical tradition talks about Lot’s wife, turned into a pillar of salt, for she looked back on the burning Sodom. The Greeks sing of Euridice, an eternal shadow at the gates of Hades, condemned by Orpheus’ doubtful gaze, though in this case she is not the one who has turned around. I personally prefer the Roman version: on the night that Troy falls, Aeneas takes his father, his son, and the shrine of his gods, yet loses his wife Creusa during the chaos.

Creusa is perhaps burnt to her death. Just like my lover.

Only then did I realize what atrocity I was witnessing. Only then did I know what must be done. I turned back to the exit. I threw a blanket on him, wrapped him in, and tugged him. His weight was surprisingly light for a man. I was tearing but I could not cry. I could not even flinch. The smokey air scalds my throat. I went on my knees and dragged him out to the staircase. I became the Aeneas, holding the father and the child.

How could I ever forget that you taught me the Aeneid?

But I could never carry you again, nor could I ever reach to touch your cheeks. Your Sappho and your Vergil, your thousands of kisses and little schemes and big plans, and your yearning look when your eyes set on me, so clear and so adorable.

Yet there is one that I could carry.

It is your child, and she will carry your name.

Your name is An.

* * *

The nurse jotted something onto her clipboard, “And what is the last name?”

“... An... spelt, with one N only.”

“An.”

Reader's version with references