Future Home of the Living God

by Louise Erdrich

  And sometimes he is just Phil.

  Except for the part about the bloodshot eyes, the bald head, and teeth like a wild boar, the description of your father, my angel Phil, is metaphorically accurate. It is taken from the Treatises of Dr. Rudd, which reside in the Harley Collection of manuscripts in the British Library. But I am sure that other sources, primarily myself, would describe Phil in more intimate depth as sweet, hot, big, funny, good-natured, a liberation-theology Catholic who cannot operate in any other church.

  We fell in love last year. Or, more accurately, Phil fell in love with me. Working on a Christmas play we gradually got to know each other—coffee, drinks—but we carefully kept ourselves in the company of others. It was not until months later, as we stored props and riffled through equipment one evening in the basement of the church, that we found ourselves suddenly alone together. Phil put the wings on. I helped strap them over his T-shirt. He turned around. His beard and thick hair looked absurd with the wings. We both went silent.

  “Did you always want to be an angel?” I asked.

  “They always make me a shepherd,” he said.

  “Or a wise man?”

  “Baby powder on my beard and a velvet robe. All it takes.”

  I looked too long into his sweet eyes. His stare was calm and kind. Before I knew it, we were on the floor.

  They had closed the church. Turned the lights off from the top of the stairs. Didn’t see the bulb burning far back in the storage closets where I was looking first at the honey-colored slats of the old wooden ceiling, then at Phil very close-up and personal, then at the marble chips embedded in the polished terrazzo floor. The prop closet was too much for us. We stayed hours, all night. I tried a gown on, a mantle, a veil, the helmet of a Roman centurion. He wore sandals. I suppose it was sacrilegious, but it was also hilarious. We made love dressed as Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the Angel Gabriel, and Santa Claus. We were the Three Wise Men. Herod, Pilate, and two gay shepherds. And at last we made love as ourselves. We slept in a pile of clothes, woke at dawn, hung the costumes back up, and walked away, exhausted lovers plodding through a new world.

  We kept seeing each other, but I tried to space things out. To stay away from him, if I could. Most of the time, I couldn’t. I decided that if he didn’t ask about birth control I would keep not using it. But then he did ask, in a way that let me know he wanted me to use it. Not a dad, then, I decided. In late spring I bought a test and when I knew for sure that I was going to have you I sat down outside in my tiny backyard. I leaned against the trunk of the beautiful old sugar maple that grows there; it was just putting out the festive red tassels that precede its new leaves.

  All I knew for certain was that I wanted a child.

  I wasn’t sure I loved your father right then. Oh, I loved to be with him, there was no doubt of that. I was even compelled, infatuated? And he let me know that he was wild about me. But durable love is more complex and comes from deep knowing. I think you need both the instant and the deep to classify as love—we definitely had the first. The thing was, except for Glen, men had messed me up. And lately, in general, they had become militantly insecure. Within many churches, men were forming supersecret clubs with even secreter subchapters. There was no telling whether Phil was part of one or not. If he belonged to one of those clubs he wouldn’t tell me even if I asked. On the day I took the dipstick test, the phone rang while I was sitting underneath the maple. I bolted inside to answer it. As soon as I heard his voice I said I’m pregnant and then I slammed down the phone and locked myself in the bathroom, where I ran a hot bath and got into it and lay there until it got cold, whereupon I ran more hot in and so on even though eventually I heard your father pounding at the door and yelling. I didn’t answer the door. I had decided that although I maybe loved him, I didn’t trust him. Was I crazy? I don’t think so. The question is whether I am crazy now.

  * * *

  “I am not going back, you know.” Phil looks at me as he starts eating his sausage sub. “I belong here with you and our baby.”

  Phil’s a vegetarian most of the time but he loves meat and becomes carnivorous in times of stress. His family is Italian and Spanish, but from way back a century ago at least when they came out to settle Pig’s Eye, as St. Paul was called then. Phil’s ancestors worked the building trades, put up the basilica and the cathedral. Stonemasons, carpenters, tile setters, bricklayers, artisans of plaster and paint. And Phil ends up a parishioner in an unattractive modernist-style church with no details other than geometric stained-glass windows—a rhomboid and a parallelogram. Our church has an austere cockeyed bell tower. A props trove inherited from two Catholic schools bulldozed long ago. Plain wood pews. Abstract hangings. And that terrazzo floor polished to a high gloss, it turns out, by reformed drunks.

  So do I love him at last? Child, I need him. It is hard to tell the two apart.

  Yet Phil is the rarest of animals, a genuinely good person who doesn’t make a big deal about his unusual niceness, and who, in spite of this niceness, has a sense of irony.

  “I’m going back to my place just long enough to pack my stuff,” he says, “and I’m taking a key so you can’t lock me out.”

  Phil’s happiness radiates across the table. He reaches out his big square hand and cups my balled fist. I haven’t ever had to depend on anyone like this since I was a child—for food, shelter, safety. I don’t want to depend on anyone now in this way.

  “Have you told any friends about the baby? Have you told your parents?” he asks.

  I’ve talked constantly to Phil about Sera and Glen, perhaps because I am so worried about them, but I haven’t told him about the strange, sweet voice answering their telephone. I haven’t told him how many messages I left, or about the one I found slipped under the door. Now, when I do tell him all about these things, he looks so serious that I’m immediately struck through with tremors of anxiety. My chest hurts suddenly; I can’t seem to take a deep breath. His voice catches when he tries to speak. He clears his throat in distress.

  “I don’t know how to say this—”

  “Oh my god I hate when people say that!”

  “Okay. Cedar. It is now a crime to harbor or help a pregnant woman. So if Glen and Sera know maybe they decided to disappear.”

  Hearing that you are suddenly a danger to others, besides wanted and hunted, gives a peculiar jolt. I’m thrown into myself, and can hardly answer.

  “Glen and Sera don’t know I’m pregnant, or they’d be here. But I told my Potts family.” And then, because I need to change the subject, I hit the table with my fist. “Phil, we need some food.”

  “Right. I’ll hit a grocery store on the way back.”

  “Here.”

  I hand him a list of high-protein and long-shelf-life items. I’m glad I shopped when I did, but I’m nervous. I tell him we need a water filter, and he raises his eyebrows and says, “Where am I going to get this?”

  “Camping supply store.” I also give him some of the money I got from the bank.

  “It’s a good thing I don’t show yet,” I say. “Nobody in the neighborhood knows.”

  Phil’s expression shifts; he leans across the table and cradles my face between his workman’s palms. Love builds in his face and eyes and takes away my breath.

  “You show now, Cedar,” he says. “You do show. I want you to remember that. Don’t even stand in front of a window.”

  * * *

  Phil does not return and of course I can’t reach him, or my parents, or my Potts family. Cell phones locaters can’t be turned off now so Phil has buried our phones, swathed in layers of plastic, in the Pioneers and Soldiers Cemetery. Sometimes the internet works, but I’ve told Phil how this Mother apparition appears and he agrees we can’t use it. My fear of leaving the house causes me to do what I do when I panic. I read and write to divert myself.

  You kick, you remind me of your existence. An update. Last week you began to absorb sugar from the amniotic fluid you’ve been swallowing. Your l
ittle digestive system now can handle the sweetness. Your bone marrow’s making blood cells and taste buds are forming on your tongue. Your brain and nerve endings are mature enough to feel touches. You graze your face with a finger, suck your thumb. You’re over seven inches long and you weigh as much as four sticks of butter. If you’re a girl, you’ve just made all of the eggs you’ll need the rest of your life. If you’re a boy, you got your balls this week.

  Trouble Not Loving Phil

  Some men smell right and others don’t. You know what I mean if you are a woman who breathes in the fragrance of the stem end of a melon to choose it or if the odor of mock orange or lilac transfixes you or if you pass a piece of woody earth and know from a gulp of air that the soft, wet, fleshy foot of a mushroom has thrust from the earth somewhere close. Men smell good in all different ways. Salty vanilla. Hot dirt. New grass. Bitter leaf. Some are disturbingly odorless. Others dope themselves up with cologne. You can smell fear, vanity, secret meanness, a lonely heart, envy, and cruel thinking. Likewise, easy confidence. Even goodness. You can smell if a man likes you.

  Phil smells as if he’s been in the sun even if he hasn’t, and he’s warmer than most people. His skin is very smooth on the tops of his arms and shoulders and chest, but his hands are callused because he likes to make things out of wood. Sometimes he smells like that clean and honest moment when a saw cuts into a board. There is a brownish gold Mediterranean undertone to all of Phil. Even his voice has that feel to it—a sunny depth. Phil is five years older than me. The first time I ever smelled Phil we were sitting in a booth in a coffee shop. Someone told me to squeeze over, and I tipped toward Phil. There was the slightly scorched odor of ironed cotton. Then the tiniest hint of sweat. I had the urge to lick his neck.

  * * *

  Phil’s not back yet.

  * * *

  Like so many Minnesota boys, Phil was raised on dairy products bearing the image of the Land O’Lakes Butter Maiden. She is the logo on the waxed cardboard one-pound butter box, a lovely, voluptuous Native girl kneeling in a lakey landscape, holding out a dish of butter. Like so many Minnesota boys, Phil folded her knees up to make breasts. He gazed at her 1/16" shadow of cleavage while eating his toast. She was a constant in his life. That night in the props room, dressed as Joseph, he confessed that after he met me, the Butter Maiden had started to haunt his dreams. She walked off the blue and yellow box in a short dress of fringed buckskin. He said she wore high-heeled leather moccasins. She looked like me. How flattering, I said, meaning the opposite. Instead of butter, she offered, in his dreams, whipped cream, sour cream, whole milk, and fresh mozzarella. That is not a Land O’Lakes product, I said to Phil. I know, but fresh mozzarella is one of my favorite foods. It’s round and slippery, he said. He told me that in his early twenties at the University of Minnesota, he majored in wildlife biology and thought he might become an ornithologist, but he had realized that in a few years there would be few birds for him to study. He would be studying the history of birds on this earth.

  Phil told me that around the same time he understood this fact, his one serious relationship ended badly. He took a vow. Do no harm, to anything or anyone. Save nature. He decided to dedicate himself to preserving bird habitat, and got an advanced degree in ecology. Since then, he has tried to protect the natural world wherever possible. Without being specific, he told me that he’s gone beyond the law. He has also infiltrated some groups that he doesn’t agree with. He did this on his own, he said, because he could. I wondered, now, what that meant? Because he could? Because he was a white man with white male standing in a world where in some places that got him into those groups? When he’d taken his vow he’d struggled so hard, he said, that he thought he’d forgotten about human love.

  “Guess not,” I said, back then, staring into his eyes.

  “Guess not,” he answered, staring into mine.

  August 29

  I am typing late into the night, trying to keep myself from logging on to the internet, when Phil taps at my window. I run to open the door and in stumbles Phil with two Cub shopping bags and a loaded, beat-up black backpack. He’s unshaven and weary, his eyes are bloodshot with exhaustion, and his hair is stiff with dirt. I sit him at the table and pour him a glass of water. He tells me that there’s no food in the stores. Everybody figured out all at once that there would be a food shortage, so people are hoarding food, stocking up. The supermarkets are open at weird hours, whenever some shipment comes in.

  “Where did you get this?” I rummage in the bags. “Peanut butter! Mixed cocktail nuts. Granola, peas, corn, crackers, more peanut butter. Baked beans.”

  “Church basement,” Phil says. “Left over from funeral and wedding meals. There’s more in the car.”

  “Potted cheese.”

  “Nothing fresh, but they are selling fresh stuff in the streets here and there, I mean it’s August. The farmers’ market is going, I’ve heard. It’s not that there’s no food right now, but there’s panic about the long term.”

  “We should get fresh stuff. I’ll dry it, can it, freeze it. Do you think there will be electricity?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody knows.”

  Phil is quiet, drinking his water, gulping it, nervous.

  “And why were you gone such a long time?”

  Phil draws me onto his lap and I lean against him. Then he tells me there’s a complete news blackout now—no newspapers, no television, radio extremely sketchy. Nobody knows exactly what is happening. There are news kiosks all through the city where people congregate to share rumors. He was gone a long time because he bought a lot of guns. There is nothing to say after the phrase a lot of guns.

  “I’ve got them locked in the trunk. I backed up onto the lawn. I thought I should tell you about them before I brought them in.”

  I slide off Phil’s knees and walk around the kitchen, straightening and arranging my yellow and white checkered curtains, which slide together on fake brass rods. The thing about the guns is just incomprehensible. It’s as if Phil told me he had a rhinoceros on a leash out there. My family has never owned a gun or had one in the house; we support several campaigns to end gun violence. We are not the kind of liberals who make big noises about how we aren’t the namby-pamby knee-jerk types and how much we like our weapons. We are firm. I had assumed that Phil thought like me.

  “We can’t have guns in here,” I say to him.

  “I don’t want to either,” Phil says. “But sooner or later it’s going to come to that. They’re offering rewards now for anyone who turns in a pregnant neighbor, acquaintance, family member, whatever. There’s billboards. Ads up on lampposts. It’s true.”

  My brain is buzzing. My voice is tiny.

  “What are they doing with all of the women?”

  “I don’t know.” Phil stands up and holds me against him.

  “What are they doing, Phil? You know something. . . .”

  “Word is . . .” He doesn’t want to say.

  “Tell me.”

  So he does tell me. All of the prisoners in the country have disappeared. Most people say they have been euthanized. Or freed, which Phil doesn’t believe. The prisons are for women.

  “I thought the hospitals . . .”

  “Those too.”

  “What about the babies?”

  He keeps holding me, won’t look at me. I can feel his heart pound. After a while he whispers.

  “They keep some of them.”

  “Some?”

  I keep standing in his arms, but my knees are turning weak and beginning to shake. Pretty soon he is holding me up. His face is in my hair and I can feel how tired he is from the sag of his shoulders. But when he speaks he seems angry—not exactly with me but he is looking at me when he talks, voice shaking.

  “It’s like they said it would be, Cedar. Don’t you remember?”

  “No!”

  “They have a registry, Cedar. Remember?”

  “No.”

  “How can you have missed
it? You went to the doctor.”

  “My doctor let me go. I told you. And stop glaring at me.”

  “Yeah.” He looks down at his feet. Speaks to the floor like a sullen teenager. He smells like sullen teen too—rancid sweat, old clothes, gasoline.

  I turn away and focus on what I remember about the ultrasound doctor and his questions. Did he mutter something? There was more, I was sure of it, there was more. We’ve got one, he said. The sudden meaning of the words stops me from repeating them. He said the measurements were right, I think. But We’ve got one seems to mean the opposite.

  You kick and roll. You are agitated. I decide that I have to calm down because I don’t have the fortitude right now. I can’t take another shock. It is hurting you.

  “That’s okay. I’ve had enough.” I concentrate on the gasoline smell on his clothing.

  “You got gas, too,” I say.

  “What there was of it. I pumped it into some plastic jugs because I think it’ll get siphoned from the cars. Neither of us has a locking gas cap. We should park the cars around the back of the house.”

  “I’ve got to talk to my mom and dad.”

  “That’s another thing.”

  “What?”

  “I think they’re okay. Sit down.”

  “Tell me!”

  “Yeah, of course. I went over to your parents’ house because you couldn’t get them on the phone. I just didn’t know how soon we’d get out, if ever, or maybe we’d have to run. I thought I’d better tell your parents you’re okay. So I went up to the door, knocked, and people who didn’t fit how you described your parents answered.”