Future Home of the Living God

by Louise Erdrich

  “Can you tell the gender?” I ask. “Can you see?”

  But nobody in the room is listening to me, nobody hears. I see the arch of your spine, a tiny white snake, and again your hand flips open, pressing at the darkness. The technician touches out knee bones, an elbow. Then she goes in through the thicket of your ribs. The heart, she says. I see the hollows of the chambers, gray mist, then the valves of your heart slapping up and down like a little man playing a drum. Your whole heart is on the screen and then the technician does something with the machine so that your blood is made of light moving in and out of your heart. The outflow is golden fire and the inflow is blue fire. I see the fire of life flickering all through your body.

  I whisper, or sigh, and I want to cry out. The room yawns open. I have the sensation time has shifted, that we are in a directionless flow of time that goes back down infinite tunnels and corridors, as if this one room in the hospital has opened out onto the farthest stretches of the universe.

  “Can you do that again?” I murmur, but the doctor is very intent now, pointing and nodding.

  “There,” he says, and the technician clicks something.

  “Can you tell if I have a boy or a girl?” I ask, louder. But no one answers. The technician is intent, focused utterly on what she sees. They are inside of your head now, peering up from beneath your jaw and then over into the structure of your brain, which I see as an icy swirl of motion held in a perfect circle of white ash. It looks to me as though your thoughts are arranging and rearranging already, and as I imagine this I also know that there is something wrong, something off. The atmosphere has changed; the doctor is silent. The picture is fixed. They are looking at it, and looking. They will not stop looking.

  “Boy or girl?” My throat is scratchy and dry. I see nothing on the screen, now, just white marks. Still, they can’t seem to take their eyes away until I cry out, I actually yell.

  “What the fuck do I have?”

  They both turn and I see that they were trying to think of what to say to me.

  “We’ve got one,” says the doctor in a careful voice. I hear the rustle of the technician stepping closer. The doctor’s eyes are wide and staring.

  A crack opens deep inside, a dark place, and fear seeps into my heart. I am suddenly extremely calm.

  “It’s Down syndrome or some kind of virus or a throwback . . . something bad.”

  “No, absolutely not.” He smiles now, reassuringly and even with some excitement. “It’s all of the measurements. The skull, the vertebrae, the bones, the hands, all of the measurements.”

  I swear I see the glimmer of tears in his eyes.

  “Measurements? What does that mean?” I ask.

  The doctor takes the hand of the eager-looking technician and gently draws the wand away from my body. He is a kind man, I see now, a blurrily normal man about my Songmaker father’s age, with a square, worn face and blue eyes lighted in the screen’s glow.

  “What that means is we need to keep you here,” he says. The doctor casts his eyes down and sends the attendants away. Once they are out of the room, he thrusts a copy of the ultrasound into an envelope, throws it at me. He jumps away feverishly and tells me to get dressed.

  “Hurry,” he says.

  I pull on my clothes behind the screen, dash out. He slams a roll of white cloth tape into my hand and tells me to tape him into the chair.

  His voice is filled with desperate authority, like in a movie, so I know that instead of voicing the movie confusion and needing to be convinced, I might as well bind him into the chair. It is clear he wants me to escape. Who cares from what. While I wind him into the chair, he asks if I have any special ethnicity. I mean, my hair and eyes are dark but my skin is medium to pale, so I don’t stand out as Native unless people already know.

  “Yeah, I’m Ojibwe,” I tell him.

  He asks me about the father, is he white?

  “As milk,” I said.

  “Then get the hell out of here.”

  He points out the back way, the back stairs, and tells me to wave the envelope and pretend I’m a delivery person.

  “When you get out, don’t tell anybody that you’re pregnant,” he says, “and use that last strip between my teeth.”

  * * *

  In addition to cassette players, a VHS player, the usual hipster record player, and old-fashioned speakers, Glen and Sera keep an old-school tube television in the hall closet. It only comes out for Masterpiece Theatre or big events. Now, we need it. Glen is rigging up a sort of antenna. He says that the government has seized the cable companies, but there is still some independent local programming and sometimes an unexpected glance at CNN. The curved green-gray screen spreads on from a central point. He uses a button on the actual TV set to change channels one by one until he finally gets a clear picture and some news. We settle back in the rough orange and mustard yellow couch pillows. The real newspeople have still not returned to the shows, but suddenly there is more content. The talking heads are not military experts or pundits or policy wonks but scientists of every background pulled from the laboratories and classrooms, emerging as though from a dream, their faces still flattened in shock. They rub their eyes, tap their chins, blink rapidly if they are women, and squint if they are men. We are mesmerized and can’t stop watching them one after another and all with the same tics and all saying different things that end with the same advice. We don’t know. Be patient. Science doesn’t have the answers right away. Truth takes time. And meanwhile the station has invented a swirling set of graphics—humanoid figures growing hunched as they walked into the mists of time, while in the background Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony dissolves into a haunting series of hoots and squawks.

  On other channels, the cameras are shaky and the nervous reporters are reporting on how there is no reporting. How people are out in the streets, demonstrating against not knowing what they should be demonstrating about. The signs are question marks of every color and size. The churches are full, the sports bars stuffed. People are floating in bewilderment out of their houses onto the sidewalks, even in the punishing hot air. I have come home to watch the world end. Not that it ends! That is the weirdness of it. Here in Minnesota the people interviewed say, I just wanna know. Is it a big deal to wanna know? We’ll be okay, right? I just wanna know.

  Nobody knows. I curl deeper into the big sectional couch alongside Sera and Glen in the blessedly air-conditioned house where I grew up, a huge and comfortably renovated brick and stucco prairie-style place, in a pleasant part of Minneapolis near a wide green lake invaded by quagga mussels and purple loosestrife. Bubbles of public speculation float over us. During one of Sera’s many self-invented ceremonies, which she put together from her eclectic readings on indigenous culture and Rudolf Steiner, we placed sacred tobacco all around our house and then smudged white candles with sage and stuck them in the ground and lighted them. We ate bread, walnut pâté. I drank ginger beer, and my parents drank wine. We curled up on blankets in the grass and sang peace-march songs until we fell asleep. It is one of the best memories of my life. I suppose that I was wishing for some kind of comforting ceremony now, but perhaps the search for information camped around the TV was it.

  Today is the day I’ve promised myself to make the announcement. To tell Glen and Sera I’m pregnant. I tried just after the news broke, when I walked in the door, but I felt so sorry for them. They are devastated on such a fundamental level. Sera sits in the downstairs den, in front of the TV’s ancient bulk, her long, beautiful white-gray hair streaming down her back and her eyes full of tears. The ice blue yarn of a sweater she’s knitting is heaped in her lap. Her fingers are frozen around the needles. It is so rare that she can’t knit; I don’t know when I’ve ever seen it. And there is dear Glen with his skinny little ponytail, his perfect chambray shirt wrinkling and unwrinkling with each troubled breath, his eyebrows working up and down over his rimless eyeglasses. Glen takes my hand and holds it. I grip his hand, hard. We’re solid. Ours is an
uncomplicated love. He gives one of his soul-pressed sighs and says, “We don’t need words.”

  “Yes, we do,” cries Sera, gripping the fancy skein of silk/Italian wool blend yarn. “We need one word. We need the word ‘love.’ We need it worse than ever. What if the word ‘love’ is to vanish from the world?”

  Glen’s sigh catches in his chest, and then I blurt out what I’ve come to think may be true. I say it to comfort poor Sera, but I take heart myself.

  “No,” I say, “this is love. This is what’s happening. This is creation’s love of creation.”

  Glen smiles gently.

  “Mother Earth has a clear sense of justice. You fuck me up, I fuck you up.”

  I look at him, skeptical.

  “That’s not what I meant,” I protest. But he just nods. Of course, he doesn’t know how personal this is for me.

  Sera looks annoyed with both of us, but she addresses me. “Who said that about love, the pope?” She has despised every pope, even this one.

  “No,” I say, “me. There’s no official reaction yet from the Vatican.”

  “Your pope will come through,” says Glen. “He’s such a mensch.”

  “Mensch? Forget it with the irony, Glen. That unmenschenable will deny it all or declare it’s God’s will.”

  “Maybe it’s God’s will,” I say, just to get a rise.

  “And maybe this is just humanity’s biggest challenge,” says Sera. “We should invest in one of those genetics companies. They’ll try to turn this thing around with gene manipulation. It will be big.”

  We turn back to the screen, riveted by some paleontologist, whose book jacket with the title Deep Time flashed briefly on the screen as he spoke.

  “We do not have a true fossil record of human evolution,” he says, “or any other species’ evolution for that matter. What we have are bits and pieces that have survived and surfaced over millions of years. Millions! That’s like playing 52 pickup with one deck of cards flung over the entire planet and expecting to come up with a full and orderly deck. So if evolution has actually stopped, which is by no means fact, it is only speculation, and if evolution is going backward, which is still only an improbable idea, then we would not see the orderly backward progression of human types that evolutionary charts are so fond of presenting. Life might skip forward, sideways, in unforeseen directions. We wouldn’t see the narrative we think we know. Why? Because there was never a story moving forward and there wouldn’t be one moving backward. The monkeys gaining upright posture, for instance, losing body hair, the cranium enlarging. No. We might actually see chaos. We might roll back adaptation through adaptation, the way canines will revert to type left on their own until they reach a wild dog-slash-wolflike status. Or we might skip straight to a previous hominin. . . .”

  “Which would be?” Sera turns to us wide-eyed as the station breaks for a car commercial.

  “Homo erectus, perhaps.” I have of course been paging through whatever I could find on the subject. “Or maybe Homo neanderthalensis.”

  I was really hoping for the latter, but it turns out their DNA is mostly different from ours, and we don’t have much of it. They married in, got absorbed, but who they were is still mysterious.

  “And then there’s Australopithecus, anamensis, or afarensis. There’s Paranthropus boisei, Homo habilis—”

  “Dear god,” Sera mourns, her voice breaking, “there goes poetry, there goes literary fiction, there goes science, there goes art.”

  “Cave art was exquisite,” says Glen. There is silence, but he takes a deep breath and forges gently on. “We have no idea of the capacity of our ancestors to think and feel. Perhaps they’ll be intelligent.”

  Sera turns on him with an agitated yelp and flings the yarn aside. The needles clatter across the floor.

  “I can’t believe you, Glen! You’re PC even about the foraging apes our species may become in only a few generations.”

  She speaks sharply, but she is looking at Glen in a pleading way that slowly becomes alluring. They are already drawing close in this crisis, and I decide to leave them alone. I walk out to the kitchen, pour a glass of antibiotic-free milk, and drink it looking out at the bursts of zinnias, daisies, lythrum, and digitalis in the yard—they still look normal, no change in their colors yet. This is an unusually cool day for August, which means it is only ninety degrees. A hot breeze stirs the heavy weight of leaves in the sycamores that line our street. I try not to think of how my parents are contending with the crisis; they have always had a hot sex life, and as a child I knew more about it than I wanted to. Glen and Sera didn’t believe in shutting up and although their bedroom is on the farthest end of the second floor, away from mine, our house is old and their warm kittenish cries, their weeping, and what sounded sometimes like hard work, even furniture moving or séance-table dancing, traveled through the ductwork. When they took matinee naps together, I ravaged the kitchen, just as I am doing now, knowing that Sera would emerge from their bedroom and waft downstairs looking blurred and peaceful. She wouldn’t yell at me. She would clean up after me and cook something solid, maybe her usual Sunday vegetarian lasagna, which we would eat at the wide old antique table that had actually spent a previous life in a nineteenth-century Irish pub. They’d fallen in love with it in a Galway antique store and had it shipped over. My parents are both lawyers. Sera, who was a nurse-midwife before she went to law school, represents home birth, doula, midwifery practices, and other community-based health-care concerns, and Glen is an environmental lawyer. They rely on substantial trust funds, which they shifted to bonds way back before the technology stock bubble burst the second time, then shifted out again, into real estate, then flipped their houses just before the last housing crash. Which is to say, they are shrewd as only market-based-society suspicious trust-fund liberals can be.

  I want to tell them about you so much, but I am having trouble, and it isn’t that I don’t think they’d understand. For instance, there is that letter Sera gave to me with an earnest right-mindedness. The Songmakers even said they would be willing to visit my reservation family—which of course they did. I haven’t fully explored why, and now is not the time, but I haven’t forgotten. Anyway, Sera and Glen have always supported my explorations of identity. I know they would embrace and support me now. But they’re overeager about some aspects. They want a piece of Native pie and I don’t really have any pie at all. I just have you.

  I’m not angry with Sera for disparaging your kind, whatever that may be, and although I do feel pleased that Glen stuck up for cave paintings I refrained from telling him that they were created by people pretty much like us only 14,000 years ago. Not even an eye blink. I am beginning to see that what the paleontologist says is true—we do not understand how much time has passed on this planet and we have no concept of our limited place in the enormousness of that time. But numbers are haunting me, big numbers. Time is not like millions in things, or money, or people. In terms of time, a million years is almost ungraspable. My brain wobbles when I go past recorded history. I can’t imagine 4.4 million years, which is thought to be the outside figure on the amount of time we’ve been roughed out as proto-human. Homo erectus just goes back just a mil. We’ve been ourselves, Homo sapiens, for something like 300,000 years. We got to be us somewhere in the Pleistocene. I positively can’t go to billions—the 4.6 that is our planet’s age, or imagine 100 million years, which is the amount of time that dinosaurs were the dominant life-form on earth. Dinosaurs lasted so much longer than we have, or probably will, yet their brains were so little. Meaning that stupidity is a good strategy for survival? Our level of intelligence could be a maladaptation, a wrong turn, an aberration. This should be a terrible thought to me, extremely disappointing, but somehow, perhaps because I am carrying you, little baby, I can’t seem to feel the level of consternation that this news causes in everyone else.

  Perhaps it is because I saw your brain in an icy whirl, your blood as fire, your tiny hand—which maybe was not a
normal baby’s hand? Still, you are wondrous, a being of light, and I am not afraid.

  “Are you all right?”

  Sera appears in the kitchen and lifts away my empty milk glass. Then she begins in an eager and precise way to remove bins of sugar and flour. She takes out her graduated measuring spoons and expertly scoops out and tosses salt and baking soda into a bowl. My mom often cooks when troubled, and before I decide whether to give her question an honest answer she has mixed up a batch of pancake batter.

  “That’s a strange thing to make on an August afternoon,” I say. “We should be eating corn on the cob or watermelon, shouldn’t we?”

  But she is already ladling the batter onto a smoking black cast-iron pancake griddle—it has a gleaming pitch patina and belonged to her mom.

  “Comfort food.”

  “Okay, Mom. But I still think it’s odd.”

  Sera seems mesmerized by the pancake batter she spilled with such slow expertise that it made a perfect circle. She is watching for the little bubbles in the center that will tell her when to flip the pancake. Her hair is now twisted on top of her head with a beaded clip, and her ragged, sexy chignon shines with a metallic vigor. Early on, she went not gray, but silvery white; her eyes are deep blue and her skin very fine and clear. A winter fairy queen is what she always looks like to me—ethereal and wise. Not that I always agree with her occasionally whacked ideas.

  “Mom.”

  “I’m sorry now.” She puts her spatula down with a sudden flailing clatter and claps a hand to her mouth. Her eyes pop with tears.