I wake up with a groan, clutching my side. He has been at it again, clearly, I’m feeling that pulling sensation of a body part missing. It’s another experiment which by the feel of it has deprived me of something on the right of the torso, maybe a bone or a medium-sized organ. I can feel the incision and it’s not that small.

He has been doing this ever since I got here. I don’t remember what happened to me before then, it’s all like a shapeless void. The first thing I do recall is opening my eyes and him frowning above me, murmuring. Over the next few days, I had the sense that he was pleased but something was missing. He paraded me in front of everyone, surreptitiously watching for their reactions and mine, and embarrassed me by making me guess what everyone’s name was, as if in an exercise to jolt my memory. It didn’t help, I couldn’t remember, so he ended up telling me what I should call them.

Then, he started going on about replicating the effect. Next thing I knew, I was having blackouts and he was cutting away at my body and trying again and again to extrapolate my structure onto the tissue he gathered. Among the first things to go were my tail and wings, but then he moved inside. I am now down to my last gall bladder, as far as I’ve been able to gather, and I believe I only have two lungs remaining.

The pitiful results of his experiments run or crawl around everywhere, bleating. They don’t talk and are ugly and malformed. He is not getting rid of them and has tried, halfheartedly, to prod me into interacting with them, but it’s too heartbreaking. Provided I still have my heart of course, one can’t be sure in this environment. Something is thudding in my chest right now though.

It is already getting light, everything awash with that clear bleakness of just before the sun comes up in earnest. Things are moving and noises can be heard, but I can’t see him. He must be with the new creation. Did it work this time? And what did he take? I finger the cut, scar tissue already forming, and sigh.

Getting out, I look around for them. They’re not in sight, which means the new one must at least be mobile. That’s promising. I go searching, and eventually hear his deep voice. There can be no mistaking it, he is teaching. Can it be? Has he finally made something that can listen? I turn a corner and there they are. He is showing the new one around the orchard, pointing out the better fruit and probably giving the same speech he delivered when I first got here, about respecting the rules and not touching what’s not mine.

The new creature seems like a pared-down version of myself. It is upright and has the same number of limbs, at least. It’s got long hair on top and very little of it further down. I observe some structural differences and note that it has no tail from the outset. He gave the others tails. Perhaps he now thinks that intelligence has to do with a lack of one. Maybe that’s why he cut mine off.

He notices me peeking at them and beckons me over, beaming.

“Adam, meet Eve! I am very pleased with her. She might be the one!”

“Eeeve,” I try. What an odd name, I never would have guessed it. But then, I don’t remember any names. For all I know, it might be very normal.

“A-dam,” says Eve. She can talk! The others could never manage “Adam”.

“Why don’t you show Eve around, Adam,” he says. “I’ve already explained to her the rules of the orchard. Now you can take her to the water, show her where you sleep, that kind of thing. It’s best if she learns the ways of the place from you if she is to keep you company from now on!” He is suspiciously excited. I am afraid that this apparent success will only goad him on, and that now he will have more raw material with which to work. For some reason, I don’t want him cutting into Eve. She seems a bit fragile. She is smiling.

“It’s nice to meet you, Adam,” she says. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you much about myself, I haven’t been around long.”

“Not long at all,” I mutter, rubbing my side. “Fine, then let me do the talking. I’m Adam, as you know, and I’ve been here for a while now…” I trail off, realizing that though I am less new than her, there isn’t much I can tell her about myself either. “Would you like to see our waterfall? Or maybe our mountain?”

“I would love to see anything you show me, Adam,” she says with another smile and puts her small hand on my upper arm. That gives me new feelings. I never know what to do about new feelings. Shaking her off, maybe a bit brusquely, I turn to go. Eve follows, seeming unbothered.

The walk to the waterfall is long by the standards of our place, it is all the way on the edge. He must have put it there so it doesn’t smash all the plants, because all that water is quite heavy actually. I found that out by standing under it on one of my first days here. It didn’t smash me, but it felt like it could, if it could. In that case it was fortunate that only he can do anything to really affect me. He still told me off for behaving foolishly. I think it was the day that he added the rule about being nice to my body to the ones about respecting everything and about the orchard. Well, he needs me to be nice to it so he can use it for experiments like Eve.

Oh yes, Eve, who is trudging next to me without complaint and craning her neck to take everything in. I snap back and start dutifully pointing out the landmarks.

“This is the bit with all the prickly plants. And that area over there is everything that smells sweet. I go there sometimes to sniff things and get happier.” I feel moved to confess that, as though predicting she might need something to make her happier sooner rather than later.

We stand by the waterfall for a while, Eve murmuring appreciatively and asking me all sorts of questions. I don’t know much about what the water does, but I show her the interesting way it splits into four a bit further down, and tell her the names of the four parts, as he told me in the beginning. The name “Hiddekel” makes her giggle and my breath catches. I giggled too, when I first heard it.

By the time it gets dark, we are back at my sleeping corner, sitting and chatting like it’s the most natural thing, like Eve is not the first one he’s made who talks, like she is not the only other one I can talk to besides him, and I don’t like talking to him unless I must. I’ve got quite the den set up, made of the biggest leaves I could find and softened with different-colored fur I’ve picked up from the prickly area where it snagged on the plants as the beasts walked. I’d never take anyone’s fur that they were still using. Unlike him.

I watch Eve as her eyelids begin drooping and her mouth begins opening wide with small aaahs, fearing this may be a sign of her regressing into one of the bleaters, but then she explains she is feeling quite sleepy. It makes sense; she’s never slept before. Suddenly, I feel the urge to cover her with one of the big leaves, so if he comes in the night, searching for more things to cut off, he might not find her and content himself with cutting me.

The next day we both wake up at the same time, and sure enough, there’s a bit of Eve missing. He’s removed her left- and rightmost noses, leaving her with just one, sticking forlornly out in the middle of her face. She looks so strange I avert my eyes as she grabs at herself in alarm.

“Adam, what is this?” she cries. “What happened to me?”

“He happened to you,” I grunt. “Don’t worry, I’ll not take you to the water today, so you don’t have to look at yourself. Be thankful he’s not done worse.”

“Has he? To you?” she asks gently.

“Yeah. Lots. And not just me, others around here as well. You’ll see.”

As I speak to her, I dart my eyes around to see what he’s made out of her noses and whether there’s been another success. No new ones are visible, but he strides into the clearing and calls for me. I scramble out of the den.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Now, Adam, be nice,” he admonishes. “How did you sleep? How is Eve getting along?”

She was fine until you took almost all her noses, I want to say. Instead, I just shrug.

“My experiment with her was not a success,” he says with some concern. “Perhaps only the original ones, like you and the beasts, are suitable for experimentation. Or maybe I can find a different way to reproduce her.”

“Do what you like,” I say, but inside me grows the realization that I won’t have him do what he likes. Not anymore. I try to suppress it, but he knows. Of course he knows.

“Oh Adam,” he shakes his head. “I am doing this for your own good, you know. You seemed lonely so I made you a companion, and I’ll make more. Just you wait, I’ll multiply you until you are happy! All I want is for you to be happy.”

“I am grateful,” I say through my teeth. “Will this be all? I want to show Eve the mountain today.”

“What a great idea! Well, I’ll leave you to it then,” He claps his hands and turns to go. Eve peeps out of the den. Her face is so deformed it gives me new feelings.

“Wait,” I call and run after him. He stops, surprised. I’ve never tried to stop him before when he was about to leave me to my own devices. “Can you make my face match hers?” I whisper to him.

“What?”

“My face. My noses. Can you make it so I have only one in the middle, like her? If she is supposed to be my companion, I want us to be similar, like the other beasts.”

The thought of becoming voluntarily hideous, and of him touching me when I am awake, makes me shudder, but I know deep down that this is the right thing to do. The new feelings tell me so. He raises an eyebrow but says nothing. I try to express a deep desire to be relieved of noses both through my posture and through what he can read inside me.

“Oh, very well.” He raises his hands to my face, grabs a nose each and pulls. With a slight pop, they come off. He examines them in his palms. “Maybe I can make something of these. Enjoy the mountain,” he adds loudly over his shoulder to Eve, who is staring at us, eyes rounded, not understanding the scene.

On the way to the mountain, Eve keeps raising her fingers to her face and mine in turn. She has already asked me why I did what I did so many times I have run out of ways to explain it. My new feelings are becoming stronger, to the point that I feel the need to take a detour through the sweet-smelling area and calm myself down. As I bury my face in the petals, Eve says, uncertainly, “I think I’m hungry.”

No surprise there. Yesterday, we were so busy talking we never went back to the orchard for the evening feed, and the morning’s events pushed fruit out of my mind as well. But now that she mentions it, my stomach growls too.

“Let’s go back to the orchard then. We can see the mountain another day,” I say.

On one of the trees in the orchard sits the snake. Like me, he’s had his wings cut off in an experiment, so he no longer flies, just stomps around moodily on his stubby legs. He likes climbing trees because it gets him higher up, close to flying. I nod to him, and he nods back. He says nothing, just watches us pick some large, beautiful fruit and settle for a meal underneath the tree. After we finish, we carefully return the seeds to the ground near the trees, as the rules instruct. We don’t know what the ground does with the seeds, all we’ve been told is they belong to it and must be given back.

“Is this fruit delicious?” asks the snake suddenly.

“It is very good,” I say. “You don’t eat fruit, do you?”

“I eat what I can get. But why do you always pick only from these trees? How about that one, with the shiny fruit?”

“We’re not allowed that one.”

“Why not?”

“Because we’ll die if we eat those,” Eve chimes in.

“What does that mean?” the snake asks.

“We don’t really know,” I explain, “he just told us the rules forbid eating those fruit and that if we disobey, we die. It sounds bad though.”

“But have you seen anyone else eat from it and die?”

“I’ve never seen anyone eat from it at all. And if we did, how would I know they’d died? I’ve never seen it done.”

“Presssumably,” the snake draws out the sound, “you’d be able to notice something bad happening to them. But I guess if nobody eats from it, the point is moot anyway. I’m just saying, they look good.”

“You don’t know what good fruit looks like.” I am annoyed now for some reason and no longer want to be near him. I get up and pull Eve by the hand, “Come on, we should be getting back to the den. It’ll be dark soon.”

“Fine,” says the snake. “I get it, you’re living by the rules. I respect that. Enjoy your night.” As he pierces the bark with his claws to shimmy higher up into the branches, his eyes linger on my scars. He hasn’t mentioned my noses, but it seems that he has guessed something. I am unsettled and then further unsettled by the fact that this feeling is not new. My stomach has sunk this way before, my heart recognizes this flutter. Does he come to everyone in the nights? And now Eve, too? And how long have I harbored this resentment without being aware?

While Eve sleeps, I sit at the entrance to the den, waiting grimly for him to show up. I don’t have a plan, I don’t know what I will say or do to him when he does, I don’t even know what he looks like at night when he comes plundering our bodies. The only way I’ve ever seen him is the way he looks in the sunlight, and he doesn’t have anything sharp on him to cut me with, no claws, no beak. Whatever I may expect, it doesn’t happen. He doesn’t show. Exhausted with the fearful wait, I arrive at a decision.

“Eve,” I shake her, “Eve, wake up. Can you wake up, please?”

She bats at me groggily.

“Huh? ‘msleep.”

“I know but you have to wake up now. We must go talk to the snake.”

“‘Bout wha’?”

“About protecting you. He’s the cleverest here, and we have to make sure you don’t lose anything else like you did your noses.” That gets her awake. She sits up, covering her face with both palms, rounded fearful eyes peeking out between the fingers. My whole inside is thumping urgently now. I help her out of the den, and we run towards the orchard in the hopes that the clever beast is still lurking in the trees there.

“Back so sssoon?” he sniggers when we run into the circle of the trees. “Still hungry?”

“Can we talk?” I bark.

“We are talking, aren’t we? Impolite though you are, bursssting in on me like this. I could have been sleeping, you know. Or busy.”

“Please, snake.”

My tone must take him aback. He climbs down the tree trunk to my eye level and peers into my face, like he can read something in it. When he speaks again, it is in a very different tone.

“What happened, Adam?”

“You know my name?”

“Every beast in the Garden knows your name. He made sure of that when he brought you before us. You are supposed to be his bessst work, his peak.” His voice dips, his eyes lower. The resentment I hear in him echoes my own.

“If I am the peak, why is he still trying? Do you know what he does with the pieces he cuts off at night? Have you seen the attempts?”

“Of course. We all have. I think he is trying to see if he can have more than just one. Well, two now. Apologies, Eve.”

Eve is not listening to our conversation. She is distracted by the eerie shine of the fruit on that forbidden tree in the predawn light. She reaches out a hand, and as she does, she is watching her own fingers, not the fruit. It is as if she is mesmerized with the moment just before she finds out what it is like to transgress.

“Eve, don’t! You know the rules.”

“You know,” says the snake, “I am beginning to think she is a better version of you. What made you so afraid?”

“Being used as building material, for one. But also, he did say we will surely die if we eat from the tree.”

“Nonsense,” the snake scoffs. “You won’t die. Well, not unless die means know.”

“Won’t you just say what you’re thinking?”

“Why did you come to see me?”

“I need your help finding a way out. I can’t have him doing to Eve what he did to me. She doesn’t deserve it. I thought you, out of everyone, would understand.”

He laughs and raises a paw to his shoulder where his wing used to be.

“Oh, I do understand. And so would you if you were to eat the fruit. Don’t you see, that’s your way out! He told you that you would die if you ate it, and he made it sound scary, but what if all it means is you’ll be free? You will go and never come back, never let him experiment on you again! You will know what the world is like outside the Garden, and you will know what is good in that world and what isn’t. Of course he’s afraid of that! Already you’re realizing that what he’s doing to you is not good. How long before you come to other conclusions and stop trusting him at all?”

I look at the snake, and it is as though I am opening my eyes for that first time again, bleary, with no way of knowing what I will see when they open fully. It is as though I have never seen before and am now ready to see.

“Eve,” I say, “let’s have some fruit.”

She nods, picks two and hands me one.

And then we die.