Future Home of the Living God

by Louise Erdrich

  “What?”

  “Your vaccinations, darling. Is it too late?”

  Throughout my childhood, again and again, filling out forms every school year, Sera refused to vaccinate me. It is her suspicion that additives in the shots or the vaccines themselves cause autism or mercury poisoning. I was one of several students at my alternative school unprotected, though, and I was fine with it until I read about Native susceptibility to European viruses. Nine of every ten of us died of measles, smallpox, what-have-you. As a descendant of that tough-gened tenth person I had some natural inherent immunity, but still. Now, Sera’s sudden horror at the coming possibility of mayhem, rampant disease, whatever else, irritates me so intensely that for a moment I let her suffer.

  “Yeah, it’s way too late. I’ll probably contract adult-onset polio, or a blazing case of the measles. Maybe I’ll keel dead of whooping cough before we find how this all turns out. I’ll be sorry to miss it.”

  “God, Cedar, please don’t. We’ll get a doctor.”

  “You don’t have a doctor. Which I think is wrong.”

  “Glen has one. We’ll get his doctor to vaccinate you.”

  “Mom, vaccinations take years to work. You need a whole cycle of them. Remember when you were vaccinated? You’ll be safe, at least. You’ll be the one holding my hand as I puke black blood and itch myself to death from smallpox.”

  The pancake starts burning and she scrapes it off and throws it in the garbage. She looks at me, stricken for a moment, then suspicious. It dawns on her that I wouldn’t actually say these things if there was any possibility of them coming true.

  “Cedar.”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you get yourself vaccinated?”

  “Of course. When I was eighteen. For you, not vaccinating me was a class thing. Upper-class delusionals can afford to indulge their paranoias only because the masses bear the so-called dangers of vaccinations.”

  She ignored what she would usually have called me being obnoxious, and just stood there, struck with relief.

  “You never told me you did it!”

  “Well, duh, I didn’t want to get you mad.”

  “Oh honey, I’m so happy. I’m so relieved!”

  She leaves a new pancake to burn while she comes over to the counter and buries me in a hug, a really satisfying hug. I am glad to get a hug like this, for my own reasons, not hers. I need that hug so much that I cling to her until those tears in her eyes fall.

  “You’re vicious.” She stands back, wiping at her face with the palm of her hand.

  “You should get your tetanus shot. They’re good for ten years. It’s an ugly way to die.”

  “I will, I will,” she promises, “though I don’t think that contracting tetanus is going to be the big problem.”

  “Cholera?”

  “No,” she says, “reproduction.”

  I form my lips around words but no sound emerges.

  She succeeds in making two perfect pancakes, and passes them to me on a plate, whipped butter swirling in the center. And there’s expensive real maple syrup from Canada because maples here no longer produce. Sera has always loved presenting Glen and me with artful snacks, with made-from-scratch chicken soup when we were sick, with bowls of garlic mashed potatoes when we were sad, and now, with cornmeal pancakes to stave off the apocalypse.

  Glen enters and sits down with his plate of pancakes. He cuts his into buttery squares, pours half the syrup over the cut squares, then forks them rapidly into his mouth. I’ve always known him to eat quickly when emotionally disturbed.

  “Slow down,” says Sera. “You’re upset. I mean, of course you are. But slow down anyway.”

  But his eyes are distant and black—people sometimes think that Glen is my real father. When I was little, his hair was totally dark. He shows the Norman Conquest in the appreciation of his food, too, and his love of rituals surrounding meals. When he cooks, all else stops. Sera and I used to sit at the counter drinking wine while he crushed basil, toasted pine nuts, happily struggled over complicated recipes. So it’s a sign of his distress, just shoveling food in, and this afternoon he can’t seem to stop. He doesn’t hear Sera, and he finishes the pancakes hardly pausing for a breath. When they are gone, he looks at us, bewildered.

  “I think of one thing, and then another, and I don’t know what to do.”

  “Well, here’s one thing you don’t have to worry about,” says Sera. “Cedar got herself vaccinated. She won’t get anything major.”

  I open my mouth to speak, it is the perfect moment to announce that I have contracted, so to speak, the most major thing of all, given the situation. I put my lips around the words “I’m pregnant,” but just can’t blurt them out. Sera is so happy with my tiny bit of news; the odds of my survival are suddenly, irrationally, increased in her confused thoughts. I just can’t ruin her sole moment of hope. So I begin to talk to my parents about the numbers, the millions and billions, even knowing that they aren’t going to understand on a visceral level, the way timeless time got to me when I looked at you on an ultrasound screen. They aren’t going to see into that measureless dimension. To add the shock of you to the crumbling of their foundations is too much.

  We waft outside. The late summer light bleeds on and on. My parents share a bottle of wine and don’t notice that I drink lemonade instead, or that I cannot finish my pancakes. We sit on the back porch. They wave at neighbors, trot to the fence to chat, wiping sweat off their foreheads. We make plans to stay, to run, to hide, to live normally. We decide to stay vigilant, then argue about whether vigilance is a strategy. And all the while as the light slants lower and lower, bathing us in a gorgeous, smoldering glow, my heart slowly cracks. The deep orange-gold of the sun is pure nostalgia. An antique radiance already sheds itself upon this beautiful life we share. I grow heavy, rooted in my lawn chair. Everything I say and everything my parents say, the drift of friends, the tang of lemonade, the wine on their tongues, the cries of sleepy birds and the squirrels launching themselves without fear in the high tops of the old maples and honey locusts, branch to branch, all of this is terminal. There will never be another August on earth, not like this one; there will never be this sort of ease or precision. The birds will change, the squirrels will fall, and who will remember how to make the wine?

  We laugh at funny memories, we hold one another’s hands. We agree that this whole development is a bitter triumph for secularism. Creationism bites the dust, big-time. But as my parents fall silent, and I look at the landscaped yard in the failing light, and wonder how the birds will turn out, I know that we’ve come to the end of science. Human beings might be saved by science. It might happen, but I am quite sure even then there will be no true explanation. If evolution has reversed, we’ll never know why, any more than we know why it began. It is like consciousness. We can map the brain and parse out the origins of thoughts, even feelings. We can tell everything about the brain except why it exists. And why it thinks about itself. So the more I consider all of this, the more it seems that our predicament would be best addressed by an acknowledgment of the Anima Mundi, the Soul of the World.

  I say good night and walk slowly up the stairs, carpeted the day after I hit my head at three, tumbling down those stairs when they were hardwood. I suffered a slight concussion. I still have a tiny scar at my hairline. The story is that Sera called a carpet store the next morning and bullied them into an emergency installation. So my footsteps are muffled creaks, and heavy, but my hand on the polished banister is light. I brush everything I pass, as if to touch it good-bye. That night, as I am falling asleep in my childhood room, which is used partly as a guest room but still has my soccer trophies and dolls in it, I lie on my back and fold my hands right over you. As I descend into welcome unknowingness, I bob up, once. There is something I have to do, I think. And the next morning I remember that I have decided to write this—your diary—a record and an inquiry into the strangeness of things.

  I creep out while Sera and Glen
are still shut in their bedroom, mumbling themselves awake into another day of realization. I will have to write from the familiarity of my own lair of thought in South Minneapolis, my house on a forgotten dead end running right up to an unused railroad embankment. I bought the tiny bungalow with money I inherited from my Songmaker grandmother. I’m lucky. The backyard pours into the tangle of forgotten railroad right-of-way, overgrown with scruffy trees. As I pull out of my parents’ driveway, I look back through the rearview. Something is off. I stop the car. The porch lights, which usually burn through the night, into morning, are extinguished. The street is without electricity. The whole neighborhood has lost power. Which is not unusual, and yet it seems that something much worse has happened, for my graceful childhood street has the stillness of an ancient dream, the muted perfection of a “before” disaster photograph. I try to shake off this disquiet. But all the way back along the calm, empty South Minneapolis streets, I feel that, instead of the past, it is the future that haunts us now.

  August 15

  I have already felt you move. Your bones are hardening, your brain is hooked up to stereo—your ears. So you can hear me, you can hear my voice. You can hear me praying in the car and as I enter the house. You can hear me as I read aloud the first words of my letter to you. I am going to tell you everything, bit by bit, day by day.

  To begin with:

  I lift the envelope that holds your ultrasound picture. I’m scared to look, still I slip out the picture and press down the edges. But the ultrasound doesn’t tell me much. The markings make no sense to me. Carefully, I tape your first picture onto the cover of this bound journal. Then I use a roll of clear packing tape to cover the picture. But I’m disappointed, disoriented. I thought women loved their ultrasounds, saved them, so maybe I’ll get a feeling for the gray and white blur of limbs and head that feel so alien yet ordinary.

  Our house is a small two-bedroom rambler, backyard a blissful disorder, front yard tangled too. Entry set far back from the street. It is a place I could afford only for its lack of a garage, which remains half built. The outside is plain beige and the inside also similarly mute. I’ve only made my imprint on the kitchen—a friendly yellow—and the utility room—space-age white. The walls I’ve newly added insulation to are open—I have the Sheetrock but I haven’t closed them up. A work in progress. Still, this is our haven and our den, the place I can be merely the nameless being I am, a two-decade-plus collection of quirks and curiosities, the biochemical machine that examines its own mind, the searcher who believes equally in the laws of physics and the Holy Ghost, in reading my favorite theologian, Hans Küng (the one chastised by Ratzinger but loved by our present pope), and trying to live by the seven Ojibwe teachings, Truth Respect Love Bravery Generosity Wisdom Humility, which I’ve only read about and do not know from, say, a real Ojibwe person.

  I sit down on the edge of my bed and untie my tennis shoes, lifting each foot onto my knee. Then I kneel beside the bed, as I always do, grab my rosary from around the post and say a few Hail Marys, for comfort. I crawl into bed and sleep for two hours. You kick and somersault and I dream as one does in the light—fitfully, racingly, dreams of paranoia and those CNN graphics. The telephone wakes me, an old-fashioned analog landline. The ring sounds like it might be your father’s ring and I don’t answer it. You rock from side to side in the cradle of my hip bones. I sit up, and gulp down a glass of stale water. It is late morning now. I pick up the academic paper I was reading what seems a light-year ago, titled “The Madonna’s Conception Through the Ear”; it is an examination of the belief that God’s whispered breath caused the Incarnation. After twenty minutes, I put the pages down.

  “What did he say?” The ceiling is cloudy, sandpapered, rubbed almost blue here and there like real sky. “What was the word that just did it for Mary?”

  The word intrigues me, now more than ever, the idea of a word so uncanny, a word so powerful, a word actually so divine that its expression infuses a woman’s body with a pregnancy of godly nature.

  Of course, I know that for most theologians the Incarnation was not caused by some literal and actual word or utterance. The word is an idea, the idea of God. Küng has pointed out that the Incarnation itself could not be related only to the mathematical or mystical point of the birth or conception of Jesus, but must be related to Jesus’s life and death as a whole. Still, the idea of this actual word continues to preoccupy me and to suggest that somewhere outside the actual human experience of words spoken, words thought, there exists a language or perhaps a pre-language made up of words so unthinkably holy they cannot be said, much less known.

  Perhaps you will know how to speak this language. Perhaps it is a language that we have forgotten in our present form. Perhaps you are dreaming in this language right now. And perhaps there is a word that has changed the course of human existence. A word written in the depth of things, a word within the quantum and genetic and synaptic codes, a word that told all beings and all life—enough.

  Sometimes my brain races so hard I can’t keep up with it, which is why I’m glad I live alone. I don’t know what I’ll do when you are here. Write on your diapers? On you? Here and there, I scribble messages, notes, ideas for the next issue of Zeal. I have to somehow imbue the in-progress issue with the shattering development; I have to figure out a theme. I have several articles and a dozen academic papers to sort through and decide whether there is something I can use. As always, I will probably end up writing a contribution myself, too, under an assumed name.

  For lunch, I cook and eat a whole bag of frozen peas with butter, drink two glasses of milk, fry two vegetarian burgers and place them between two pieces of bread with sliced pickles, mustard, ketchup, and why not, an onion. As I bite into the onion, all of a sudden I know, completely know: this issue’s theme will be the name of my church and subject of the ear/fuck paper—Incarnation. My issue will examine the breadth of thought on how Christ’s divinity was made flesh. What could resonate more with what is happening right now? Now that it appears we might be losing our own spark of divinity, our consciousness, our souls?

  New energy of purpose claims me and I clean the kitchen, wash and dry every dish, and when everything is put away I go into my workroom.

  My desk is a large, sturdy, portable banquet table set up on one side of the utility room. The other side holds my washer, dryer, and wall-to-floor steel shelves of white file boxes neatly marked with dates and titles of my projects and back issues of Zeal. The only windows are small rectangles set high into the west wall. But I have full-spectrum fluorescent bulbs in the overhead panel and two natural-light lamps at either end of my desk. When I turn on all of the lights, the room is a brilliant white, the blue screen of my computer the only major block of color. On Glen’s advice, I’ve fixed electrical tape over the aperture that holds the computer’s camera. It seems absurd, but he made me promise.

  I am the utterance of my name. I sit back in the chair and stare at the white wall. This line of a fragment of the gnostic text The Thunder, Perfect Mind, is the last sentence I wrote before I drove north. It is unlike me to reference writing other than canonical references, and the tractate is troublesome. But I am drawn to the text and have read it so often that I have much of it by memory. For I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin. Perhaps it is the voice, I think, so arrogant and so alive, using antithesis to cause in the reader’s mind the romantic dissonance that occurs when one attempts to comprehend the unknowable. I am the midwife and she who does not bear. I am the solace of my labor pains. I am the bride and the bridegroom. And it is my husband who begot me. I am the mother of my father. . . .

  I am comforted by the voice—it is so ferociously modern, so timeless that it is perfectly of this time. For here I am, maybe a walking contradiction, maybe two species in one body. Nobody knows. A woman, a dweeb, a geek, a pregnant degreeless dilettante straddling not just millennia but epochs. I
am also an insecure Ojibwe, a fledgling Catholic, an overstriving brain cooking up conflicting dramas. I can’t help myself, I overcollect trivial ideas and can’t distinguish them from big ones—yet the Incarnation, that’s big. That’s pertinent, I think.

  Perhaps we are experiencing a reverse incarnation. A process where the spirit of the divine becomes lost in human physical nature. Perhaps the spark of divinity, which we experience as consciousness, is being reabsorbed into the boundless creativity of seething opportunistic life. A great wish courses through me. I am curious with desire. I want to see past my lifetime, past yours, into exactly what the paleontologist says will not exist: the narrative. I want to see the story. More than anything, I am frustrated by the fact that I’ll never know how things turn out.

  My old-fashioned phone rings and continues to ring. I’ve kept it because Glen and Sera insist. They don’t trust cell phones. First the Stingray, now the translucent Jellyfish bobbing around in parks and yards. They capture cell phone information for big corps who bombard your phone with calls. The landline is unlisted and has a strong filter. Your father is punching a redial button. He’s frustrated, of course. At some point, I am going to have to answer my phone. Or unplug it, I think, and reach toward the receiver but do not pick it up. You make a rolling swerve deep in my pelvis and tingling needles shoot down my thighs. I lean closer to the desk and to the keyboard, writing my introduction, “imagine what it was like for the young woman, Mary, to feel the extraordinary kicks and shocks of her unborn child and to know that she harbored a divine presence, the embodiment of God’s Word. Yet, what she felt was probably little different from what all pregnant women have felt, throughout time, ever since we could both feel and be aware of our feelings. This bewildered awe for the mysterious being we harbor certainly borders on a mystical apprehension. . . . ”

  But the words on the screen are suddenly so paltry and finite and thin, impossibly futile. “Pregnancy is a wilderness of being,” I type, then rest my hands on my belly, think for a while, then type again: “In this wild state the markers are so ordinary and mundane that the grandeur I feel as well seems delusional. Perhaps at all times and in all countries women with child are actually at risk. At some level we are quite insane. We go about the business of the day and find out that our baby, like every other baby on earth, will be a throwback of some kind. We can’t imagine what yet. Our entire evolution up until now has apparently been coded into some part of the blood or tissue we haven’t noticed or deciphered.”