At Nazarin’s confused look, I giggle even more. “Never mind. Old song by a man called David Bowie. Sorry.” It was from post-1969, so I first listened to it after coming to San Francisco, during my and my sister’s self-taught education in music. I clear my throat, try to calm myself. “I have no idea what she meant by ‘the red one, the fair one, the handsome one.’”

He searches for quotes relating to red. The following appears on the wall:

Isaiah 1:18: Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.

Exodus 28:15: You shall make a breast piece of judgment, in skilled work. In the style of the ephod you shall make it—of gold, blue and purple and scarlet yarns, and fine twined linen shall you make it.

“Mean anything to you?” he asks.

I shake my head. “Nope.”

He searches for “the fair one” and the snippet from the Song of Solomon appears:

My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.

I still shake my head. Tila is beloved to me, of course, but the quote doesn’t jump out to me in any significant way. Does she want me to come away with her?

He frowns. “I’m sure we’ll find out something. There’ll be a kink in this trail somewhere.”

He tries a general search, not in the Bible, of “the red one, the fair one, the handsome one.”

“Got it,” Nazarin whispers.

The triliteral Semitic root ADM: red, handsome, fair. And a word from it, “adamah,” meaning “ground” or “earth.”

“Adam.” The word rasps from my throat. My head spins and I lean back on the chair, closing my eyes, hiding my face in my hands.

“The first man? Does that mean anything to you?”

Of course it does. And it has nothing to do with the original Adam from Genesis, the rise of Eve’s original sin or the fall of man. It has everything to do with a nice boy with a genuine smile, laughing through the pain as he tried to catch green grapes in his mouth, his left arm a stump on the pillow, his infected foot propped up on the bed. A lifetime ago. A world away across the bay.

“It does. We knew a boy named Adam. But I don’t know how the hell he’d have anything to do with this.”

“Maybe Mia wanted us to speak to him. Where is he?”