Future Home of the Living God

by Louise Erdrich

  Winding yarn reminds me of my knitting days at Waldorf school, and how we learned to neatly ball up the yarn and undo the skeins, how it felt to knit all together in a room, singing, in our classroom with the fairy-pink walls and rosette ceiling. I made a scarf. I think Sera’s still got it—she was thrilled that I’d made it of her favorite color at the time. Black. They let a child knit with black! It looks so pretty with her pale hair. Now it is surely put away somewhere, in our house which is inhabited by the people who did things properly in the world as it was before, and who have inherited it now. While we are working, we keep the television off so that we can listen for people approaching in the hall. Spider Nun has a watch and soon indicates that lunchtime has arrived. We put away our work and pretend to be absorbed in a show I’ve clicked on—a continuous tape of a documentary movie about the reproductive lives of penguins—which we’ve seen already dozens of times. When lunch comes, we eat it all, swiftly, trying to absorb nutrition before we actually taste the food. I take the trays back out to the lunch cart and we return to our room. The bustle of lunch subsides. We wait for a vitals check. The Slider enters, her feet sighing along the floor. Her flossy brown hair is set in Victorian doll ringlets around a wrathful, pinched face. When she speaks I am so frightened I’ll betray something that I fix my eyes on her hard lipsticked orange mouth. Her thin shoulders hunch and her glittery black eyes drill me. Even her voice sounds clenched. She takes our pulse, blood pressure, temperature, all in silence, now, frowning. Blood samples. Urine samples. All collected. She decides for some reason to check the pupils of our eyes with a little flashlight, and to take bits of nail clippings. She snips a strand of hair from each of our heads and seals it into an envelope, fills out a label on the envelope.

  “So what are you taking all of these little bits for?” I can’t help asking. “Are you making voodoo dolls?”

  The Slider’s eyes go harder, trying to squash me, but I fade away, intentionally lose focus.

  “Or maybe you’re putting together a Frankenwoman. Is it a cloning thing? C’mon, these are my bits. I want to know!”

  She ignores me, which is good, I shouldn’t speak at all. Try to stay inconspicuous. Draw no attention. Don’t laugh. She asks the usual questions about fetal movement, and carefully records my answers. Spider Nun doesn’t say a word, but the Slider jots things down anyway. All of a sudden, the Slider jerks back Spider Nun’s bedcovers, as if she’d find a baby hidden there! I hold my breath, sure she’ll find the half-picked-apart blanket. But my roomie has cleverly positioned the blanket underneath the top, intact, waffle-weave blanket, and the blankets stick together. There is nothing out of the ordinary. Panicked anyway, I pretend I’m sleepy and yawn, then cry out to distract the Slider.

  “Is it normal to sleep all of the time like this?” I ask her. As she turns to answer me, the ball of yarn Spider Nun was just working on slowly rolls from under her pillow and bounces off the bed, then begins to roll across the floor toward the Slider’s feet. I yell up at the ceiling.

  “Ow!”

  “Ow, what?”

  “The baby just kicked me real hard. Ow! Again! Feel!”

  The Slider comes to me and bends over my bed. She moves her stiff, hard little hand across my belly. Pauses. I feel you shrink away from her hand—so dry, white, and cold. Meanwhile, Spider Nun creeps from the bed, following the unrolling ball of cotton yarn. It meanders between our two beds and then stops just behind the Slider’s feet.

  “I don’t feel anything,” the Slider says.

  “Wait! Here!”

  Obligingly, you shift and turn. I yell again.

  “That’s normal.” She sneers. “You’re full of juice today, aren’t you, dear. If you can’t calm down, I’ll be glad to order you a sedative. Would you like me to put a request in to your doctor?”

  “Who is my doctor?” I ask.

  Spider Nun has crept behind her, and now snatches up the yarn. I grab the Slider’s hand.

  “Don’t worry,” I cry out, passionately. “Really, I’m fine.”

  She wrests her hand away. Whirls around. Spider Nun’s back in bed, covered up, looking indeterminately sad. She has this profound, tragic, silent stare that she sometimes directs into space and from which she will not be distracted. The Slider doesn’t even try. She just gathers up all of our body samples and departs. We turn off the penguin channel and drowse, waiting to see if she returns. We sleep an hour, two. We need to sleep during the day so that we can stay up weaving all night.

  October 14

  We are at twenty feet now, and you’re getting so big that I’ve got to get out of here. You’re pushing on my lungs, and I’m breathing hard and quick. If I don’t move around enough, one side of my butt goes numb. Got to leave! We measured our rope last night by laying out the rope on the floor—I have size-ten feet and can pretty well work out the length by walking the rope. I figure that we want twelve feet for each story, and an extra eight for the piece we tie to the bed legs. There can’t be much of a drop at the end. We can’t afford too much of a jolt, we are afraid of hurting our babies. At least, I assume that Spider Nun feels the same as me.

  Orielee comes in and wakes me for another ultrasound but first she takes my blood. I get my blood drawn every day, but Spider Nun gets hers taken twice a day, which alarms me. She’s so small that it seems to me that she must need every drop she’s got.

  “I don’t mind having my blood drawn,” I say to Orielee as she ties an amber rubber tourniquet around my upper arm and snaps at my veins, to make them rise, “but can’t you say something about my roommate? She’s getting her blood drawn twice a day. It’s too much! And anyway, what are they doing with all of this blood? Drinking it?”

  “Well, I guess they’re checking it,” says Orielee. “And yeah, it says here I’m supposed to do her. Poor little thing, says here she’s not gaining a bit of weight. It does seem like a lot.”

  Orielee bites her lip and shakes her head as she looks at Spider Nun, but her sympathy is so exaggerated it seems false.

  “Why don’t you just take a little extra from me,” I say, “and leave her alone? Can’t you see how weak she’s getting?”

  Orielee sighs and presses the needle in. She’s very good, and does it so lightly that it hardly hurts.

  “That’s sure nice of you, but I can’t do that.”

  “But she’s getting weak!”

  “And between you and me,” says Orielee, “I’ve seen where some of this blood we take they never even look at.”

  “You mean it goes to waste? Nobody even drinks it?”

  “I shouldn’t say, but yeah, I mean no. It goes to waste. Still, I could lose my job substituting blood, and sometimes they do check.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “Researchers.” She gestures vaguely out the window, toward the bridge over the Mississippi where all day people are still passing between the campuses.

  “The U’s still going?”

  “Most things are still going,” says Orielee. “But they’re making lots of different rules. New rules all of the time. A person has to be so careful.”

  “Not to break the rules?”

  “Yes.”

  I rush into a set of lies.

  “And sometimes you don’t even know what they are! Like me, I didn’t know I was supposed to turn myself in, I had no idea.”

  “How couldn’t you?” Orielee seems astonished. “It was all over the place, still is. Ads, even billboards and stuff. You couldn’t miss it!”

  “Yes, you could,” I lie some more. “I don’t read the papers and don’t watch the news. I was happy, but I was sick a lot, too, so I stayed indoors or sat out on the porch. People saw me all of the time and nobody said anything. Nobody turned me in.”

  “Well . . .” She looks at me doubtfully.

  “Well, what? I mean, they just came and got me. But nobody actually turned me in, I don’t think.”

  “They . . .”

  Orielee’s eyes are very round
and maybe even a bit teary at the corners. She wants to tell me something.

  “Maybe . . . ,” she softly says. I wait. She takes a deep breath and looks quickly at the door, then at Spider Nun, who is sitting straight up in her bed with her eyes closed, apparently meditating.

  “There was this man,” says Orielee, “who was helping lots of women hide, I guess, and they got him. I think I heard they followed him to where you live. So he was helping you, too, right? It’s okay, understandable really, it was just his belief, you know, to hide the women. But they got lots of names from this guy.” Her eyes are round, very round, and her mouth makes a little o before she says, “Because they can do that, you know, with their persuading methodologies. Everybody talks.”

  October 15

  Last night, I picked apart an entire blanket and saved it carefully and stayed up weaving through the long hours until dawn. Tears leaked out of my eyes as I worked. My fingers started to chafe and bleed. Spider Nun finally took the rope from my hand. The adrenaline wore off and I collapsed. I slept all of this morning and tried to continue sleeping on into the silence of my heart. But I am awake. There is nothing but Phil’s face and my face and Phil’s hand and my hand and Phil’s heart and my heart and the old, old, words What have they done to you? I open Thomas Merton’s Raids on the Unspeakable.

  Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because He cannot be at home in it, because He is out of place in it, and yet He must be in it, His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst.

  In this thought, at last, I find a scrap of comfort. I have always believed in a tortured god from reading Catholic history because I know this: there is nothing that one human being will not do to another. We need a god who sides with the wretched. One willing to share misery. I keep on winding, and weaving; my rope twists in my hands. It is near lunchtime and I put my ball of yarn beneath the covers. I compose myself and wait. Spider Nun waits, too, consulting her watch. Soon enough, we hear the rattle of the lunch cart, the tiers of plastic trays bearing sludge, and we pretend to be asleep. The door opens. I look up. When I see who holds the lunch tray my brain skips. Sera sets the tray on my bedside table and cautions me with a look, but she can’t help it, either. Can’t help being suddenly overcome.

  I put my hands over my mouth, but tears start up in my eyes and I cry out, muffled, “Mom.” Sera looks at Spider Nun.

  “She’s okay.”

  “I don’t have much time.” Sera wipes at her face, fiercely whispers. “Look, I’ll be here tomorrow. I’m with Jessie. Don’t try and talk to her though.”

  “Where’s Dad? Where’s Phil?”

  “Your dad’s okay. . . .” She hesitates.

  “Phil?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Get us blankets, Mom.” I pull back the covers and show her a glimpse of the woven rope. “Have Jessie get us blankets. Our rope is nearly long enough. We need help getting out though. Somebody’s got to help us break a window.”

  The other food delivery woman sticks her head in the room.

  “C’mon!”

  “Okay,” says Sera, loudly, grinning at us. “This is going to make it easier,” she whispers. She’s amazed at our work and I am as proud as a preschooler. She turns away, and I’m swept through with such a sense of desperate love I can hardly help from crying out, begging her to stay with me. Her silver fairy hair is caught up in a net. She has lost weight, she is angular. She turns to glance at me over her shoulder and I see that she has her capable face on, the face she wore on my two emergency-room visits, the face of packing the car for a vacation, the face I saw during Glen’s idiotic affair, the face of Thanksgiving dinner preparations for thirty people and the face of teacher’s conferences. It is the face that got me into college and the face that got Glen out of jail after many an arrest during protests. The face of I’ll take care of it. The face of failure is not an option. The face of the household general. I breathe a long, deep sigh and eat every bit of my lunch.

  October 16

  Two orderlies walk me down to ultrasound again. The same attendants are always there. They treat me with great kindness, impersonal serenity, but no matter how hard I beg they will not let me see you. They will not turn my pallet, or bed, to the screen.

  “No, darling, no, hush now.” They stroke my hair and fuss with my threadbare bare-ass hospital gown. They are used to women pleading with them, I suppose.

  “How far along?” I say. “Healthy? Boy or girl?”

  “Healthy, oh, very,” says the brown-haired woman. But she will not let me know how far along your body has progressed, how big or small you are, how close to what they call viable. Afterward, I try to question Orielee.

  “Tell me. Please. I know it’s on the chart,” I say, but on this she is adamant. She won’t even give me a hint.

  “I’d lose my job and probably my clearance,” she says. “Give me a break.” She also says that she is sorry and that she’d want to know, too, but at least she doesn’t take Spider Nun’s blood.

  “I’ll make up some excuse.”

  Spider Nun nods at me in relief as she rolls the sleeve of her hospital robe back down. Her eyes are deep with meaning. She keeps staring at me. I know that she wants to speak—but maybe she really is voiceless and hasn’t the power. We now have nearly thirty-two feet of rope, and it is very difficult to hide. It is so chancy, now, that we won’t dare work on it except in the darkest and quietest hours of the night. So we’ll get less done. Today we pick apart as much as we can, and wind the yarn. Our hands are a problem, cracked and raw, dry from the hospital air and we use up all the hand lotion they give us. We don’t want to raise suspicion by asking for more. But even worse than lotion I miss lip balm. I remember the days when I had three or four tubes going at a time. On my desk, in my pocket, in my purse. My lips are so parched I can’t take it anymore. I go out on my usual walk and loiter near the front desk until Jessie sweeps out from the interior back office with a pile of charts. I shouldn’t bother her, it’s dangerous, but I can’t help myself.

  “Could I please have some lip balm?”

  “I don’t have any. Ask your nurse,” she snaps. Her eyes are telling me to back off. “She’s right behind you.”

  “You need something?”

  It’s the Slider, whose approach was so quiet and unnerving that I jump a little in my skin.

  I use my meekest voice. “I’m sorry. I just wanted some lip balm. Or maybe Vaseline.”

  The Slider’s mouth twists. “We’re not a spa. We’re trying to keep you alive so you can have your baby safely. Here, not out there.” She tips her head savagely toward the window at the end of the hall, the shatterproof glass.

  “There are lots of women dying out there, who don’t turn themselves in. Your babies aren’t easy to deliver.” She opens a cabinet, reaches behind some files, pulls a small plastic tub from what must be a secret stash.

  “Thanks.” I put it in the pocket of my robe and keep my fist jammed around it. The Slider has her own obscure reasons for trying to scare us. There is no reason you’ll be any more difficult to deliver than a regular baby, that I know of anyway. Still, her comment nags at me. She gets to me. Even if we escape, I have no idea where we’ll go, how we will elude recapture once we’re out. I’ve always heard that convicts who plan long-term and elaborate escapes from prison are, on the whole, easy to recapture and rarely stay free more than a couple of weeks. It’s the afterward, the impossibility of hiding anywhere you haven’t already been—that’s the hard thing.

  The little tub turns out to be menthol rub. It’s useless, but we take turns smelling it. Sera doesn’t bring the lunch tray
, but maybe she’s on duty for dinner. We fall asleep for the afternoon in our dim, serene, horribly ugly but deceptively safe little room. My sleep during the day is always deep and dramatic. I have vivid dreams that seem so real they could be visions or events. Today, Grandma Virginia visits me again, and in the dream she helps measure my rope. “Take a rest,” she says. “Anweb. I’ll do some.” Her crooked little fingers jump and fly along the cords. “Watch out for the husky one,” she says. “She’s worse than the Slider.” She means Orielee, the one I was beginning to trust. And sure enough, when we wake up, Orielee’s come to change the linen on an unscheduled day and at a very odd time. So it is just luck that we decided to hide the rope in the heat duct before we went to sleep.

  Cheerful, bustling, Orielee tears off the sheets and shakes the pillows out of their cases. She pretends to clean under the mattresses, examining them minutely, making sure the seams are sewn, the undersides intact. She checks our little closet, patting it all over inside, and she opens and shuts the window curtains as if some sort of contraband might fall out. She goes into the bathroom, and I hear the clank of ceramic as she opens the toilet tank. The only place she doesn’t check is the heating vent. I screwed it back on, as usual, with the nail file, then hid the nail file. She finds it wedged behind the bathroom mirror—not actually a glass mirror, but a polished piece of stainless steel.

  “I’m going to have to take this,” she says, emerging from the bathroom. Her voice is sweetly regretful, but contains a partly hidden glee, and I’m relieved that I never did entirely trust her. Orielee twists the nail file in the air.

  “How come you were hiding this?”

  “Where’d you get that?” I say. “I could use a nail file.”

  Orielee pockets the file. But she steps near and tries, casually, to spot the condition of my fingernails. My hands are spread on the blanket and my fingernails show—ragged, torn. The file was never worth using to shape them.