Future Home of the Living God

by Louise Erdrich

  It should not take a biological apocalypse to cure an Indian man’s depression, but hell, sometimes here is paradise on earth and there are times I just feel great.

  Love, Eddy

  I read this piece of writing over and over. At first I’m disappointed, then I shiver with anger. Depressives are so selfish, I think, so full of himself he can’t even imagine the danger that I am in. Oh well, if it comes to that, I just met him. What do I expect? But I can’t let go. I keep thinking of that feeling that I had, that true connection. And his visit. I keep trying to figure, trying to understand why Eddy would send me such a self-absorbed message, until eventually, somehow, I know that there must be something else hidden within it. I start looking for words, trying to figure out a code. If only I spoke Ojibwe, this would be easy. Like the old code-talkers. But I’m so deculturated, I think, swamped in a wave of self-pity. I put the letter down. Pick it up again. It takes way too many readings—my brain must be mush. Duh, Exodus! Typical Eddy joke. He never reads the Bible so this must refer to an actual exodus. An escape. And the numbers must be the working of a design.

  It isn’t hard to get a Bible in this place. Even the Slider approves of my request and smiles thinly as she hands over The Zondervan Compact Reference Bible.

  Exodus 1:18 is about the refusal of midwives to do the bidding of the king of Egypt and kill all male Hebrew babies. I have a panic attack right there. What is Eddy trying to tell me?

  And then I realize the numbers don’t line up. He can’t be referencing Exodus. The message isn’t in the words but the numbers.

  I take a closer look at every number in Eddy’s letter. For instance, page 1019.

  But there are over 3000 pages in Eddy’s book.

  It could be a date. It could be the date they are coming to get me. 10/19.

  Cured by the Apocalypse?

  At last, after the thousandth reading, I see it—the verse numbers refer to the sentence and a specific word in that sentence: 1:18 means the first sentence, eighteenth word. I use the code to mark the right words.

  It is apparent to everyone around me that I am taking perverse pleasure in the contemplation of this massive biological reversal. During the first week that this great symmetricism was revealed, I laughed my head off every night in front of the television. It was not just derision or amusement or outright glee at the reactions of the Know Nothingism nothing Knower creationists, Methodological Naturalists, Anti-Common Descentists, Wedge Strategists, and Macroevolution naysayers who persisted in denying the fundamental elegance and truth of evolution. True, that was very satisfying. It was more. It was awe. In spite of the hardship that a rending of the social fabric might cause for my beloved family, not to mention great unknowns in the area of reverse evolution that will probably result in mass starvation, I was and remain exhilarated. I have started reading Exodus in order to witness the working of the design: 1:18, 2:4, 3:8, 3:18, 3:32, 4:1, 7:18, 7:28, 9:9, 10:6, 13:7, 13:14, 14:11, and 14:19. The opportunity to witness the working of the design unraveling. The sheer thrill of the plan coming to light in each detail. Who says any complexity is irreducible? IT IS BEING REDUCED ALL AROUND US RIGHT NOW. I have the chance each day to marvel at the vast dismantling, and escape killing myself so that I can see more of the world’s inner workings.

  It should not take a biological apocalypse to cure an Indian man’s depression, but hell, sometimes here is paradise on earth and there are times I just feel great.

  Love, Eddy

  This week or nothing in true family (reverse) design plan to escape Indian Paradise.

  So whatever is going to happen, this week I will be in my true family. And wherever I’m going, I believe, it’s Indian Paradise.

  * * *

  And that night, awake, there is a radiance.

  Full, soft, startling, the moon hovers right outside the window.

  I turn to see whether my roommate is sleeping and find instead that she is sitting up, and moreover, that she is engaged in a very interesting task. She has knotted the ends of thirty or forty strands of yarn together and she holds the knot that they spring from between her slender, bent toes. She keeps the yarn taut with her feet as she leans over the loom of strands that move through her fingers with a mechanical swiftness. She is finger-braiding. Old-time finger-weaving. Grandma Mary Virginia’s trick. An Ojibwe method of creating fancy sashes, wall hangings, belts, tumplines, and ropes.

  I get out of bed and walk over to her. Her face tilts up to me, her eyes wide and fathomless. She freezes, waiting. I reach across the covers and touch the sash, then point from her to me, her to me, then I clasp my hands. She nods. When she tires, I start working on the sash and from then on it is the two of us. The two of us against them all.

  * * *

  She won’t tell me her name and so after that night I think of her as Spider Nun. Yes, she’s pregnant, but still nunlike to me because she’s so severe. But also potentially a superhero. I do not see exactly how Spider Nun and I will make it out the window, as it doesn’t open but six inches, to let in air. And the only way down is straight down. We are six stories up, but there is another roof three floors beneath us. If we could get out the window, we could tie one end of our sash to the bed and rappel down the side of the building. I can imagine us, I can see us, the moon new as it will be soon, letting ourselves over the lip of the window ledge, slowly walking down the side of the building. I can see it, but I know it will take upper body strength—a problem for pregnant ladies. I look around the room and decide that I will work on my arms, lifting and setting down the chair in the corner, trying to develop enough muscle to enable me to carry, legs against the wall, my 159-plus pounds of self and baby down three stories of brick wall. That is, assuming we can get out the window. Highly doubtful, but then, no other choice presents itself.

  So I keep braiding the strands, knotting with careful pressure knots, making the rope as strong as I can. As Spider Nun and I work together, one of us weaves or unravels, just beneath our bedsheets and blanket. The other is at the door, listening closely to every movement in the hallway. By now, I know each one of the nurses and can tell who is coming onto which shift. I know their names and I know as much, from friendly conversations, as they will tell me about their families, lives, origins, daily trials, and moods.

  This morning, Orielee’s on. I can tell by the scratching swish of her pressed uniform. She is the only one who actually starches and irons the patterned scrubs that all of the nurses wear. The fabric between her legs rubs noisily as she pads from room to room. The hospital is of course an Internet Use Zone, which means that every nurse who carries a computer has been thoroughly cleared, checked by rigorous security, found by a committee to have done nothing, ever, that could possibly be construed a threat. Orielee has let on that she consented to be investigated. She told me with an almost shy pride that anyone trusted with a computer now and access to the internet has never, ever, expressed what she calls a “new unconstitutional” idea. Has never purchased anything unusual or given any sign of owning an interior life or living by any other set of rules but the given rules. Not that the rules are posted anywhere, or listed, or described. I keep asking her. It seems they are an unspoken set of rules that some people have been living by for years, and others haven’t. And those of us who didn’t are now outsiders. Those who did live by those rules have power, though in many cases it is only a little power—for instance, only the privilege of typing a patient’s vitals twice daily and once nightly into a computer that may or may not have a connection to the world outside of the hospital. I don’t think Orielee is all that high clearance, because she talks a little too much. Today, she tells me about her own daughter’s second pregnancy, about how the family brought her in right away and how her husband got to be with her throughout, how he was even there when she miscarried, “as a lot of these gals do.” Since the baby was born dead, there is no point in asking what happened to the child. Orielee wouldn’t go so far as to tell me what happens to any of the b
abies. I ask if she has a picture of her daughter’s first baby, and she says, “Not on me.” But then she relents, or is tempted out of sentimental pride, to show me a photograph of her daughter’s first child, her two-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter.

  “My only,” she says, “I guess.”

  And I jump on that to say, “Wouldn’t they let your daughter keep the baby next time, if she didn’t miscarry? Since she turned herself in right away, I mean? And since the baby’s, you know, so cute?”

  Orielee shakes her head, sighs, does not answer.

  “Let’s get your blood pressure, hon. Sit still.”

  An automatic cuff squeezes my upper arm, holds on for a moment, threatful and impersonal, and then lets go.

  “Your pressure’s good, hon.”

  “Could you see if I can get my books returned?”

  “Sure.”

  “Really, could you? I need them. They’re religious.”

  “Oh, that’s right. You told me yesterday. I’ll look.”

  That’s as much as I dare push. I don’t have much hope. But Orielee surprises me just before she leaves her shift by bringing in my books and setting them down on my bedside table. I am so happy to see my books and even my envelope of the unfinished issue of Zeal that I feel my whole face breaking into a big, fat, beatific smile.

  “Oh gosh, somebody’s happy,” says Orielee.

  “Where were they?”

  “They were just mislaid, you know. They always were okay, I mean, one’s by a monk and the rest are about saints. Except for the Mad.”

  Orielee’s face never moves but her laugh is a burbling little chuckle, like the noise water makes under ice. She spooks me—simultaneously way too friendly, then her eyes so calculating and her laugh so odd. Her laugh is what I do not trust. It’s cold, the real her. She might be trying to win my trust so that she can rat me out.

  Like Phil.

  “Thanks!”

  I don’t dare thank her too much, either. I don’t dare let her know how much these books mean to me—sanity, other intimate voices, other perilous survivals. I immediately open St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul, and read hungrily. The first lines quiet me. On a dark night, kindled in love with yearning—oh, happy chance—I went forth without being observed, my house being now at rest. In darkness and secure, by the secret ladder, disguised—oh, happy chance. In darkness and concealment, my house being now at rest. In the happy night, in secret, where none saw me, nor I beheld naught. Without light or guide, save that which burned in my breast.

  Over and over, as I pick apart and wind, unknot, unravel, wind, by the inch, by the hour, by the piece, by the skein, my freedom and your life, I repeat these lines that seem so perfect to me. I’m working on the secret ladder. St. John’s words bring me peace. For it shall be as it was, I think. The meek shall inherit the earth, the undone shall take it over, the backward shall take it back, the unformed and ancient shall form it new.

  October 13

  I find out that Spider Nun flushes her vitamin too; actually, she holds it somewhere in her throat and then coughs it into a Kleenex when the nurse leaves. She wads up the Kleenex, puts it under her pillow, and then smiles at me with an alert, even-tempered sweetness. Later, she flushes the pill. She’s a dear, say the nurses. Spider Nun keeps the balls of yarn in the mechanism of the bed, underneath her mattress. I quickly see why she has begun to weave the balls of yarn so quickly into sash or rope. The yarn balls are difficult to hide, awkward, unruly, ready to roll out unexpectedly and reveal us, while the rope itself need only be thrust between the pillow and pillowcase, or even, in an emergency, rolled up and stuffed inside of our nightgowns. So just as soon as we can, we turn the blankets to yarn, then to rope. She has done about six feet already, and I’ve finished two on the rope, taking turns. We’ve worked most of the night weaving what yarn we had, then picking apart our respective blankets, winding again, weaving, so that by morning we’re in need and cannot ask for blankets again since the same nurse, Geri, on today, gave us the blankets the day before yesterday.

  Geri is a little slow—one of those soft, brown-haired women with melting eyes who registers things a beat behind normal, and gets things wrong, and is forever being told what to do by the other nurses. She often seems to exasperate them and might, in fact, be the one nurse we could actually get away with asking for more blankets as she could easily forget she gave us two already. But I think that we should save her for an emergency, and I indicate that I’ll go out into the hall and try to take the blankets on my two or three times daily walk.

  First, though, we hide our rope in the safest place we can find, inside the heating duct along with your notebook. I use the nail file I’d tucked into the seam of my backpack to screw and unscrew the duct plate. Then I press the nail file into a crack where the bathroom mirror meets the wall. Sometimes Spider Nun puts the rope into her pillowcase—if it isn’t the day that they change the bed linens on our side of the hall. Spider Nun has nothing to do until I return with the blankets, and I can see this bothers her. Her expression’s worried, jumpy. She pulls at her hair, sniffles, stares out the window, nods anxiously at me.

  “She’s up and about,” says Geri, popping into the room. Geri has an annoying habit of referring to everyone around her in the third person. Perhaps it serves to distance her from her patients.

  “Yup.” I’m pleasant, chipper.

  “Is she wearing her slippers? Oh, what a good preggerpot she is!”

  I want to deck Geri for calling me a preggerpot, that or fall down laughing. Preggerpot! Behind Geri’s back, Spider Nun’s cute look turns poisonous. Could she be outraged on my behalf? Gives me the warm fuzzies.

  We are supposed to wear our sticky green foam hospital booties everywhere, to prevent falls and the spread of foot diseases. And yes, like a good preggerpot, I’ve got mine on. Like elf shoes, they come to a little point in the front. The elastic cuts my instep. I wish I had a pair of polar fleece socks, some really nice booties, lamb’s wool, maybe real moccasins like Grandma Virginia. I shuffle off in my flimsy nightgown and voluminous, lightweight hospital robe. The hall is bright. Sunlight enters either end from tall banks of shatterproof windows. I know they are impossible to break, because I’ve stood near, looking out. I noticed that the windows are actually double thick with a sandwich of extremely fine wire running diamond-patterned in between. This may have been the Psych Ward before—which would also explain our window’s restricted openings, though I think that is standard in hospitals and maybe in hotels now, too.

  The handsome Somali man, who seems to have forgiven me for sitting on him, smiles as I pass. I greet him and ask after his wife, who is apparently responsible for preparing our awful food on some days.

  “Oh, she’s good,” he says. I’ve asked his name, but he won’t tell me. Still, I continue to believe that he is sympathetic to us and that we might test his sympathies even further somehow—without endangering our plan. He works nights next week and might look the other way. He might, at least, go along with a diversion when we break the glass of our window. I do not have a plan for how we’re going to do that, exactly. I’m not sure that anything that my roommate and I can actually lift together is heavy enough to shatter that window. It is not, however, a part of the plan that we can try out beforehand.

  Our friend pushes the canvas-bag-hung laundry cart just outside the door to the room, and brings out an armload of dirty sheets, pillowcases, and blankets. With a polite gesture to me, he leaves the blankets on top, then goes back into the room. Geri is on her way down the hall, though. She pauses, her brown eyes lowered conscientiously to her computer. She goes into a patient’s room, but the hall is still not safe. Farther down, a couple of nurses are immersed in a conversation. One nurse I do not know, and the other I call the Slider. She is the most dangerous of all of them, the sneakiest; I never hear her footsteps, only a sliding hiss as she enters the room.

  I must keep walking. I can’t appear to hover near the l
aundry cart. I step toward the two nurses, holding a hand to the small of my back, as though I’ve got the usual pregnant-lady backache, though I’m lucky and do not. The Slider notices me and turns to her fellow nurse—obviously they’ve been discussing a patient, a procedure, something I am not meant to hear. They watch me pass. The Slider’s eyes are deep-set and shiny as black ants. The nurses resume their conversation, then halt abruptly when I turn and walk by them again. I smile, moan a little, holding my back, take another turn, walk away. Impatient, they let themselves into the nurse’s pantry, where they keep a refrigerator full of snacks, a machine that sometimes produces ice, and a warming oven that keeps blankets heated up for those who are soon to deliver their babies.

  The corridor is now empty and I make my move. I control my walk and approach the cart at a normal pace, recheck the hallway quickly, snatch two blankets, and ball them under my arms and against you. My heart rate goes up and I feel a buzz. You kick, hard. I waddle back to my room, enter, pull the privacy curtain, and stuff one of the blankets beneath my roommate’s sheet. Spider Nun smiles in excitement, her teeth even and white as a little girl’s milk teeth. At once, she begins her work of undoing. I settle into my bed and beneath the screen of the other blanket I start unraveling.