Lillith + Big Bang Theory
by Brigitte Lewis
Lilith works at night. Penance, some would say, for her alleged crimes. It’s true that people have loved to wag a finger in her face. She’s been accused of terrible things. You wouldn’t know it, here, with the soft song of a lullaby on her tongue, the rhythm of the monitors in the background. The light in the neonatal unit at night is low and humming. Lilith moves from bassinet to bassinet, from infant to infant, clucking her tongue at their perfection.
She is not able to forget, but she is able to forgive. The bandwagon – people love to jump onto it. These thoughts move through her mind like staccato notes on a piano: repetitious, sudden, relentless. And now, the same people talk about her gift with babies. No one, they say to one another, can calm a colicky baby like Lilith. She coos at them and them at her.
Tonight, a set of twins lie in bassinets situated side by side. Two girls – one with dark black hair, one golden. They are pink and fresh, looking exactly like baked things just come out of the oven. They are yet to be named, but Lilith has taken to calling them Ulla and Lily. She does this. She gives the children names of her own, temporary names that come to mind as soon as she lays eyes upon them. It might be magical thinking, but she believes there is safety in this naming ritual, as if—because they are called upon by her—they will be safe. She tells no one that she does this.
*
The patient known as Anna O. was the first patient of psychoanalysis. She wasn’t his patient but the treatment itself was documented by Freud.
I can’t remember his name, says Lilith to Eve. She’s trying to remember the name of Anna O’s actual analyst.
It doesn’t matter, says Eve.
Lilith and Eve are drinking wine on the patio in Eve’s garden. It is late summer and the dahlias this year are showstoppers. They flower heads loom large over the two women, each of whom are reclining in wooden Adirondacks.
So, says Eve, Old What’s-his-name was her therapist.
Yeah, says Lilith, that’s right. Old What’s-his-name and Anna O. came up with the idea of talking, free association style, together. Just saying whatever came to mind. That’s where it comes from. She said it felt like ‘chimney sweeping.’
Lilith takes another sip of wine. She can’t really remember why she started telling Eve about this in the first place, but, really, what does it matter? The two of them can seemingly talk about nothing for hours.
The mind can get really clogged with soot and ash, Eve said.
That’s the truth, said Lilith. She sighs. She knows she has to leave soon. She’d rather not. Sitting here with Eve, she suddenly realizes that it’s possible she’s been lonely of late. It feels good here, sitting, drinking, talking. For once, Lilith feels like she’s the one being held and rocked, cooed and cradled.
You should stay for dinner, Eve says.
Your husband would hate that, Lilith said, bringing herself to her feet. Now standing, she faces Eve akimbo.
You mean your husband would hate it, Eve says with a wink.
Same thing, laughs Lilith.
Lilith understands that Adam is different now, different than the man she was with so long ago. It isn’t jealousy that makes her want to leave, but an inability to reconcile that the nineteen-year-old version of Adam—insecure about his own masculinity and wanting to exert his dominion over her—could be entirely gone.
He was different now. This Eve told her time and time again. He’s changed, she would say. He’s tender, loving.
I believe you, Lilith would say to Eve. And she did. Or, at least, she believed that it was possible to change and possible to be someone else entirely when you were with someone else entirely. People, like the stuff of physics, exist in relationship.
*
Everything that was was contained in something smaller than a single atom. Imagine this nothingness. Can you? Nothingness with possibility is like the whistle of an arriving train. We know what’s coming. Bringing to mind what’s been is harder. What was the train—you might ask—before its whistle sounded, before it arrived? Did it even exist? Was it just the possibility of a train?
This is a poor metaphor for the Big Bang. Immediate, sudden, momentous. There was nothing – and this nothing contained all that’s come to be. There was nothing – and this nothing was smaller than an atom. There was nothing – and then there was something.
The conditions for complexity aren’t easy to achieve. This is why it’s crazy that we’re here at all.
Did you know that in some versions of the story, Lilith was made first? If you ask her, she’ll tell you that—though it was long, long ago and though it might not matter much now—yes, this version is the truth. There was nothing. There was the possibility of something contained in a space smaller than an atom.
Lilith was made first. Adam shortly after, out of the same materials. Like clay figures, they were born of the earth and fashioned into human form. In the first second after the Big Bang, energy congealed into matter.
Lilith laughs – this story, though it is the truest version, is still but a story. Lilith, like you, wants to know what happened before the Big Bang.
*
When Lilith left Adam, she left by train. Not the most expedient way to escape a bad marriage, but she wasn’t so much looking for expediency. She wanted to be deliberate. She had a choice and she was taking it.
People love to speculate about why she left. They’ve been doing it for millennia. They get most of it wrong, but some of it comes close. Like the part about her not wanting to submit to Adam. Like the part where she told him they were equals, both made of the earth. Like the part where she told him that he was mistaken if he thought he held any power over her.
Except that she had loved him. In a way. They’d been young, wide eyes held even wider to take in one another. It had been perfect. For a time.
Here’s the part that people get wrong: the part where they accuse her. The part where they say she will devour your children, bring about the death of babies. In Eve’s phone, Lilith comes up as Mother of Demons. Lilith laughs when Eve tells her this, tells her to “reclaim the title goddamit.” They’ve both had their fair share of predetermined ideas to work against.
Train travel isn’t what it used to be and so, when Lilith left Adam, it wasn’t as romantic as she’d hoped it might be. The car was filled with steaming passengers who—like her—had been caught in the rain. She’d found a window seat and bought a one-way ticket to Istanbul. When she looked out the window, she saw the world beyond, tiny and turned upside down, in raindrop after raindrop.
*
She leaves her shift at the hospital as the sun is starting to rise. The trees in the parking lot are bare. Winter takes things down to the essentials and Lilith thinks they look like arteries – the branches seem to carry something profound from the earth to the sky.
The twins go home today. She swaddled them in preparation for their journey. Mom is being discharged now and then all of them, an instant family of four, will head home to the rest of their lives.
Lilith wants a child of her own. It’s taken her some time to admit this or, perhaps, it’s taken some time for this to be true. Either way, she wants to be a mother.
One of the stories about her says that she snuck into the Garden after she’d left him and stole seed from Adam as he slept. Lilith isn’t a thief. Besides, if it’s sperm she’s after, she’s never had trouble acquiring it. People will say that she’s a very beautiful woman. People will say that there is something about her. She walks by and a flick of warmth is summoned between their legs. All of them.
After she’d swaddled the twin girls and put them in a single bassinet, Lilith noticed that the tiny wristbands on their tiny wrists now had first names along with their last name. Lilith knew these names – they were good names. Louise and Marcella. Women warrior names. You’ll imagine that she whispered something to them before she said goodbye. Something to help them stay strong. You’ll imagine that she leaned in close to their sweet, red faces, lowered her voice to something space-heavy and sparked, and told them secrets they would eventually forget. You’ll imagine that she summoned the was in everything that was and spun it over them like smoke. These tiny beings – tiny, dense, hot, perfect. The babies contain all that was, isotropic and singular, spinning around no one but themselves, spinning around everything. Everything! Spinning and tiny and dense and hot. You’ll imagine this, won’t you – Lilith leaning forward ever so tenderly to recite, positive curvature, something atomic, vivid, sudden, poetic.
Brigitte Lewis is a writer born in California Gold Country, destined for speculation. She is a co-founding editor at Utterance Journal and a contributing editor at Entropy. Her work has appeared in DIAGRAM, The Southampton Review, Hobart, The Sonora Review, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a lyrical collection of modern myths that reimagine biblical tales. She lives in Bend, OR and can always smell a mixture of juniper and sage in the air.