The Only Eve

By Amelie Andrezel

Today is the last day.

They told us we would know, but I wasn’t sure that I believed them.  I woke up this morning and I felt it in my knees.  I don’t know why I couldn’t believe.  Al’nal never lied.

Adam was asleep next to me on the sidewalk.  

-

My name is Eve.  It’s a name from a very old story in a very old book.  It was given to me by the Others on the occasion of my seventh birthday.  I’ve read it at least a hundred times.  Al’nal says once, it was the word of God, a long time ago when the world had ears.  They turned them to the sky, he says, waiting for God to whisper.  Al’nal sighs.  He tells me God was shouting, just not at our frequency.  

I say my name is Eve, because the people in my books have names.  I want to be like the people in my books.  The Others have names, too, like Al’nal.  Al’nal is nice enough, but I don’t want to be like him.  I want a name like Jane or Puck.  Maybe Zooey.  Zooey would be nice.  

My mother’s name was Eve.  So was her mother’s and her mother’s before that.  I say she was my mother because she came before.  Just as Adam is my brother because we’re here now, together.  But Eve was not my mother and Adam is not my brother and Eve is not my name.  An Eve is a thing, a classification.  I am one of many Eves.  

I am the only Eve.

-

Adam and I grew up in the Room.  The Room might sound terrible to you or it might sound pleasant.  It all depends on the rooms you’ve lived in, and where you’re reading this now, I suppose.  If you’re reading this at all.  

The Others built the Room, a long time ago.  They didn’t always live here, you know.  That seems strange to me, now: a time before the Others and a time without the Room.  Funny how things come back around.  When the Others came and made the world better—that’s what they do, after all: take a world and make it right—they built the Room to keep us safe.

Al’nal says we were nasty to one another, before the Room.  He says there were so many of us—billions.  My books say so, too.  Al’nal says the world was horrible.  We were so many.  Too many.  He says we lived in hunger and disease, violence and poverty.  We ate and killed and scrambled for advantage.  Al’nal says we are only animals, that you can’t hold it against us.  But he shudders.  He says the world was horrible.  In my books, it doesn’t seem so bad.

I have a Saturday request for you fine people.  I’m trying to put together a new playlist for writing “Mementos of the Fall” and I’d like some help picking songs.  Here are a couple of passages that represent the feel of the story…

Nora bit down hard on the tourniquet, pulling the fibers taut to staunch the bleeding. Another round of incendiaries detonated at the bottom of the hill, the shock popping her already tender ears.  She fell flat behind the nearest bit of cover, a jagged block of concrete jutting from the ground.  An erratic spray of gunfire followed close on the heels of the explosion.  Nora scanned the open ground among the scattered ruins, but there was no sight of any of her comrades.  That was probably just as well.  It was her fault they were in this mess, anyway.

Only a few nights before, she had been in Wien, on the top floor of a tiny hotel overlooking the old ring road.  The city lights glittered through the window.  She could see them in the mirror.  Benny and Margot were fastening her dress.  Well, Margot was.  Benny was prepping her, for the hundredth time, on the details of her assignment.

“Consulate Mahler and his wife gave Dressen the invitation explicitly to talk business,” he reiterated, ducking his head so that Margot could reach to button the top button of the bordeaux-colored glove on Nora’s raised arm.  

“It’s very likely they’ll retire to the second floor library after intermission, so be sure to find Dressen before then.”

Nora nodded.  She knew the speech by heart.  Casting a sympathetic glance, Margot pulled a cigarette from the silver case in Nora’s coin purse and placed it between her lips.

They stood together in the shadows while the warden finished her rounds.  Justin shifted his hands in his pockets.  Evie knew he was dying for a cigarette, but for the most part, he kept still and calm.  She gestured toward the drug store across the empty street.  When the sound of the warden’s footsteps had faded, they put their heads down and shuffled quickly to the other side of the avenue.  Evie turned her attention to the padlock.  Justin kept his back to her, shielding her from the street, keeping a watch for any movement in the darkness.

The lock yielded quickly.  The burglars lifted the gate, wedged open the door, and slid the bars back down behind them.  They didn’t dare turn up the lights until they were safely in the stockroom.  Evie removed her dark stocking cap and Justin fished the cigarettes from his pocket.  They sat across the room from one another and waited for the wolves.

A harsh whistle broke the silent tension. 

Everyone turned to see the long-haired wolf, his hoodie pulled down so that his full face was visible.  Justin stood behind him, holding his arms tightly, shoving a very sharp box cutter under his chin.

“Everybody sits back down,” Justin said, “Or I cut his throat.  Not slow and ruthless.  Quick and bloody.  The bigger the mess, I figure, the better.  Stop me if I’m wrong.”

Evie looked at him sitting beside her, Justin the Vandal.  His dark eyes were shaded with impossibly long lashes and softened by that redness around the rims that never seemed to fade.  He had said once before that he had trouble sleeping.  It occurred to her for the first time that his eyes might not be red from crying after all.  Maybe he was just as tired as she was.  

Evie almost never looked in a mirror.  Maybe her eyelids were red, too.  Maybe they had been for a long time.  She studied Justin.  He sat with his hat pushed down on his forehead, his palms pressed together in contemplation.  There had even been a time, Evie told herself, that her fingers had looked as comfortable as his around a cigarette.  That caustic, confident, lonely man might as well have been her—sometime at the beginning.

“What was different about that first door?” Justin asked.

“I don’t know,” Evie said.  ”There was a time I would have told you it was the fear, or maybe the pain.  But the older I get, the less I believe it.”

Justin leaned forward on his knees again, studying her intently.  His face softened.

“I think you know exactly why, but you don’t want to tell me.  Don’t you trust me?”

“No.”

Justin smiled.  ”Tell me anyway.”

“I doubt that,” Evie said.  ”You seem wary enough.”

Justin leaned forward so that his hands rested on his knees.  ”How I seem or what I am doesn’t matter,” he said.  ”I want to hear the rest of your story.”

“Not if you’re going to laugh at me.”

Justin frowned.  ”I never laughed at you.  I can’t help it if I don’t know the feeling that you’re feeling.”

Evie couldn’t tell if he was telling the truth or lying, and it was grating her.  She’d spent a long time learning how to interrogate a man.  Justin made her feel as though she may as well have been practicing on animals.  ”Alright,” she said.  ”Ever since I was a kid, I’ve felt like the world just can’t be believed.  Like it’s too convenient to be real.  Or alternatively, too incredible.  It’s inconsistent in the most consistent way possible.”

Evie intended to laugh, but then she realized that she didn’t remember how she had been before.  Not anymore, anyway.  There had been a time the past had been less vague, but now she reached backwards and grasped only darkness.  Her memory was a maze of rooms like this one, crowded and dim, connected by passages like shunts.  She had wedged them crudely into place, a surgical insertion of purpose where in truth there was none.

She sighed.

“I suppose I’ve always been this way.  But time has it’s own way of bringing us to light.”

Justin nodded.

“How did it all start, anyway?”

That, Evie could remember.

“I made a bad decision on the wrong night, in the wrong place, in view of the wrong audience.”

“Is it a long story?”

“Yes.”

The corners of his lips spread around his cigarette.  ”Then tell me about it.”