Future Home of the Living God

by Louise Erdrich

  “I want to hold it,” says Tia.

  Sera gives the baby to her all wrapped up in a swaddling blanket.

  “A girl,” Sera says.

  Tia uncovers its face and it looks like any baby, a crumpled little stone-idol face, only a blue-gray color. The silence and the stillness of this baby is godly. I get up. I fall down. I am on my knees. I worship. Tia croons, holds her baby, and begins to sing. Not a song composed of words, but a song made up of sounds that I will hear later, in a different place. Sounds that were made a hundred thousand years ago, I am sure, and sounds that will be heard a hundred thousand from now, I hope. As she sings, I fall asleep beside her—her songs do soothe a baby, the one in me. I can feel you stretching your limbs, turning, settling, and you’re alive. You’re so very alive.

  October 21

  When I wake up, there is no baby in Tia’s arms. She is sleeping, not dead. I check her breath with my hand. Her face is warm. And Sera is in the corner on a little camp mattress, sleeping too. Everything’s been cleaned up. The blood. The bloody placenta. The bloody blue pads. Everything’s balled up in a white plastic bag in the corner. I can see the bag glowing in the dim lamplight. Sera’s thought of everything. I see movement, though, now, and for a while I think it is part of some dream. There’s an unreality to it. But then very slowly I understand what I am seeing—an undulating brown fur mat or rug is actually rats carefully rooting out and removing what is in the white bag through a precisely chewed hole. And more rats are piled on something placed upon the little table. They have shredded its covering. They are moving in a bizarre way, on the table, back and forth, swarming, swimming, over one another, diving into a pile of themselves and diving out again. I jump up but I am silent. I do not want Tia or Sera to see this. I do not. The rats aren’t scared of me. They just swarm thicker, faster, in a soundless, squirming excitement. I take the broom and sweep at them, but they are a tide and just keep lapping back. I see my mom’s boots, there in the corner. Frye boots. My mom’s hippie boots. She started buying them in the seventies and never quit. I put them on. I stand there for a moment in the boots, and sort of work out what I’m going to do. Then I stoop over and grab a rat by the tail. Quickly, I swing it around underneath my mom’s boot and crush its head. The cracking sound pleases me. I do another, and another. Soon, they notice. There is no sound in the cave but the crack and crack of my mom’s boots. I am really full of admiration for these boots. They are made of leather so thick that a rat can’t get a tooth through, and the heels are heavy enough to crush a rat’s skull with one crack. I crack again, maybe twenty or thirty times now, I don’t know. I crack until they understand, maybe from the rat shrieks somewhere beyond the decibel level that I can hear, what is happening. That’s too much for them. They are gone. Suddenly, they just disappear.

  They’ve ripped apart the baby’s blanket, so I wrap the tiny idol up again, tightly. I do not want Tia to realize. Then I take your striped cotton flannel blanket from my pack. It’s a blue and yellow plaid, very pretty. I secure it around Tia’s baby. There’s a couple of tin boxes where the food is stashed. I retie the garbage bag and stuff all of the bloody pads in there. I arrange the bodies of the rats in a circle around us. My mind is not right. How could it be? I know my thoughts are bizarre, extreme. I take the baby, then, and curl up next to Tia. We sleep a long, long time. Maybe days. I don’t know. The next time I wake up, the baby is gone from my arms. The crushed bodies of the rats are off the floor. In the lamplight, I see Sera at the stove and I smell something good, something with broth, maybe onions. There is a buttery type of smell. I am overpoweringly hungry and the horror is reduced to a bitter aura, more like a dream. Tia’s sitting up. She is even at the table. The same table.

  “How can you be sitting there?” I ask her.

  “I feel better,” she says.

  She is wearing a snowmobile suit, too small, maybe child-sized, because is it bubble-gum pink with lavender trim and it has the three Disney princesses embroidered over her heart. Her boots are good, Sorels, a grimy white with yellow fur. She’s eating noodles, eyes downcast, in a satisfied and even excited way. Her lank black hair falls forward with each bite. It occurs to me that losing her baby is not all bad. Obviously not. Without a baby, Tia can move in the world like a normal person. She is free. She can leave this cave as soon as she recovers, and go anywhere she wants. Tia can stroll on sidewalks in broad daylight. She can step into a coffee shop and have a coffee, if there still is coffee. She can sit down and read a book, right there, in the public eye, and she will not be arrested. Her tummy’s going to flatten out and she will not have to run away to hide her baby. There is no baby anymore. No one to drag her down. She will have to register for the womb draft, but there are surely ways out of it. She will not be subject to this freakish sense of continual paranoia. She will not have to live in a cave. Or with rats. As I watch her eat the soup my hunger fades. She has passed through the valley of the shadow, and even if she feels grief, which surely must come, she is on the other side. My valley lies before me still.

  I have a moment of resentment before I remember. We have murdered. We will never be free.

  “Come on. Get up and have some soup,” says Sera.

  “Are you really okay?” I ask Tia. I sit beside her on one of the big metal drums. My movement sets you into motion, too, and I put my hands upon you as you turn and twist, upend yourself, shoulder me. Then I feel the goodness of you again, the rightness. I’m back. I’m not sure that the sight of me won’t trigger Tia’s feelings. She does look at me a little sadly, but also I can tell that she feels very sorry for me, and worried for me. She is gentle with me—definitely on the other side.

  “Don’t you hurt? Aren’t you bleeding?”

  “It’s not so bad,” she says. Of course, she didn’t see herself from my perspective, but it seems to me incredible that someone so desperately at the very physical extreme edge of herself should now be sitting at a little table slurping soup. Someone whose baby’s died and . . . but she doesn’t know the rest. While I was sleeping Sera probably took the baby and she buried it or got Shawn to do it. Something. I do not want to know. I know enough. Her baby’s gone and you are here. And I am all around you. I am your home, a land of blood and comfort.

  I have never eaten anything as good as that soup. My hunger comes back with the first lovely swallow. Tia and I eat three cans of it before we stop. Sera brews some tea for us—hot raspberry, good for the uterus. My womb is the size of a great big cookie jar, while across from me, Tia’s womb is swiftly shrinking back to the size of a fist. She’ll be able to walk out of here tonight, or rather, tomorrow morning. Three a.m. That’s when we’re leaving. I’ll walk out, too, only trundling you, waddling beneath the cover of darkness. Sera’s telling Tia that they’ve gotten in touch with her husband. Clay apparently kept the faith just like they had planned—stayed home, waiting. He will be parked at the Perkins in St. Louis Park, just off 394. When the recycling truck stops at the Dumpsters, he’ll drive up and get Tia. But she won’t go back to her big house in Minnetonka with the slate steps and entryway floor, the cathedral windows looking out over the water. She won’t sauté onions on her stainless steel range and sleep in her pillow-top-mattressed king-size bed, curled up, a lump in the plush goose-down comforter. She and Clay are going to make a run for California.

  The thought of her going fills me like a cry. A confused strangeness chokes me. I can’t look at her now. I’m jealous not only of her freedom, but that she will return to her husband, who has a right to her, while I have no right, being just a friend. I’m just someone who loves her the way you fall in love with someone who has been through life and death with you. I want her to stay with me and look into my eyes when my time comes, like I did with her. I want her to help me have my baby.

  Rich thoughts, longing thoughts, stupid thoughts. I can only write them here. After we are finished with the soup and we bring more tea to our sleeping bags, Sera sits with us plotting the outline of
our escape. The lamp glows. I know this is a bit foolish, but it seems to me it casts a light that is magical and sweet. For it will be over soon. There is enough heat from the oven to warm our aperture inside the cliff. This is a cozy little spot, a perfect shelter. I could almost believe we were the lost children and the wise queen of a fairy tale were it not for the scrabbling, the constant stream of rat noise, the scritch of tiny claws behind the stone and outside in the corridor and under and all around us. Once in a while, a fight will break out and the rats will screech, high squeals, battling over something. Waves of them across the ceiling, invisible, loud with some excitement. I try not to listen, and do not flinch when Sera glances at me. I asked her to trade her boots for my shoes and she has. She knows the reason.

  “I hate rats,” says Tia, hunkering over. But her face has color, energy has restored itself to her skin, her arms. I’m shocked at the resilience of her.

  “I don’t mind them,” I say.

  I work away on this chronicle that I am writing for you, in spite of you, and for myself, to calm myself. It takes my mind off the rats, off losing Tia, and off our own complicated, harrowing future. Sometimes I wish I was more blunted, that these thoughts and anxieties that bump and twirl around and around in my brain, exhausting me, would quit. I work away on Zeal, again correcting another of my fake priest’s doctrinal examinations of Catholicism and evolution.

  Evolution has never been a very controversial part of Catholic discourse, even though the archbishop of Vienna has made some retro noises on the subject. In his 1950 encyclical Humani Generis, Pope Pius XII declared that Catholics would not betray their religion by believing what science has determined about the evolution of the human body just as long as they accepted that God was responsible for infusing that body with a soul. Thinkers like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit and paleontologist, have embraced the concept of evolution as a way to describe the ongoing growth and perfectibility of humanity within the evolving perfection of the cosmos. But we have seemingly reached the end of what Teilhard de Chardin hoped would be our apotheosis. Maybe T. S. Eliot had it right. Our world is ending not with a bang but a puzzled whimper.

  I put the work down. All is momentarily quiet. As there has not yet been a chance, I tell Sera that it is time, now, for her to go into detail about what’s happened to Phil.

  * * *

  He knew what was happening, she tells me, he knew when it would come. He knew that Bernice would raid my house with her cheery halloo! He knew that she would take me to the hospital in her Camry, and there was nothing he could do about any of it.

  Three women were living in the basement of our church. He was sheltering them; other parishioners were helping. Three women I knew from church, two of them with husbands and one with a boyfriend who deserted her. Phil was running back and forth between the church and me. The women in the basement were caught when a neighbor noticed number 10 cans of beans delivered to the back door of the kitchen entryway and nobody brought them in. So she did. Then heard voices. Then heard nothing. Before they even knew she’d found them out, a retrofitted UPS van was pulling up beside the church. The church was raided, and Phil was taken into custody by very friendly people. The women were taken to the hospital—a different one than mine. Nobody knows what became of the women.

  Phil was housed in the Fifth Precinct police station, where he was nicely treated, fed, warm, interviewed for two days. He was asked many times about the whereabouts of other women and he always said that the only ones he was helping were the women in the church basement. On the third day he was taken downtown, to the basement of City Hall, an ornate old brownstone building with a clock tower and a couple of blocks all to itself. City Hall is now the headquarters of the Unborn Protection Society. The old UPS trucks haul people there for questioning. They still have the phone number to call on the back of the truck, the 800 number, which is what the neighbor used. Phil was interviewed at the old City Hall and then sent out to the UPS offices in Burnsville, where he was scheduled for a truth seminar.

  These truth seminars can only be administered by ordained ministers and overseen by the military. They are conducted according to certain laws—precedents set by the church a few centuries back have come in handy.

  Sera becomes agitated. She can’t speak. She begins to weep as she talks.

  The only people who really know the definition of torture are the ones being tortured, she says. It is useless, hideous, to ask the torturers to define the act. Unless, of course, they agree to undergo what they define, they have no authority in the matter. No academic degree means anything. No doctorate. No lawyer’s shingle. No education. No citing of precedents or principle. The only thing meaningful in the definition is the word made flesh. The body has the last and only word. So when Phil told Sera very simply that he was tortured he was saying that he was sorry. Sorry that his body had reacted and given up my name and address.

  “Don’t blame him,” says Sera.

  “Well, duh,” I say, looking at her. “He’s a human being.”

  She is silent, looks down at her hands, so I know that she knows. She will tell me everything that happened to Phil if I ask, but I am not going to ask.

  October 23

  Sera and I hook Tia’s jolly, pink, padded, chubby arms in our arms. Tia’s much better but we don’t want her to bleed again. We proceed very slowly. I’m feeling fine—the soup brought me back. I’m short of breath but have recovered most of my energy. I feel strong, and although I’m shielding my heart from the thought of Phil, he’s there. He’s drawing us toward him, I can feel it. Once we’re out of the tunnel, through the abandoned house, we make our way back along the chain link to Shawn’s truck. Once again, we’re stuffed behind the seat with old boots, clipboards, oil cans and wrenches and sandwich wrappers. We’re taking 494, then we’ll run up 100 to 394 and over to Louisiana Avenue. There, we’ll drop Tia at the Perkins. Once she’s safe, we’ll head back to the city and drive to the post office building. Sera and I will be dropped off there to stay in a safe room until we hitch north on the postal truck. As we jolt along I hold Tia against me. She’s weakened from the walk and maybe bleeding slightly again. It seems to me that the brash energy she felt at first has gone out of her. She sinks against me with a gray grief that she knows her husband will not understand. I am the only one who does, or can, the only one marked in the same way by what happened to us. To say good-bye we have to cut our minds apart. The experience has bent us. For the thirty minutes or so that it takes to reach the Perkins parking lot, I just hold her. The engine is so loud we couldn’t talk together if we tried.

  We turn onto 100 and haven’t been driving two minutes when there is a sudden whirl of lights, a siren, the lights intensifying until they’re right behind us. Shawn keeps driving.

  “Get down!” Sera covers us with tarps, piles junk over us. Tia’s a lot easier to hide than I am now.

  “I’ll get out and talk to him,” says Sera.

  Shawn slowly pulls onto the shoulder, but keeps the truck idling—not that making a break for it in a recycling truck would make the slightest sense—but it helps us to imagine he could do it. Sera says again that she’ll get out, but Shawn says she looks superfakey swimming in her Carhartts, skinny swan neck barely holding up her helmet, and he’d better do it. So we sit alone in the truck after his door slams and under that tarp I am hit by such a powerful wave of fear that I begin to shudder, can’t quit, can’t control myself, really. I just shake. Tia puts her arms around me and hugs herself to me so tightly that it’s like she’s trying to weld us together. But I’m falling to pieces. I am positive now that I’ll be discovered. I’ll die, we’ll die, back in the hospital. I’ll be killed real slow for killing Orielee. And they will kill you, too. My mind races like crazy and I get terrible pictures under the garbage-juice tarp, under the discarded coffee cups and greasy jackets. I’m in labor in a white, white, room. The Slider is there to keep me company. She smiles whenever I’m in pain. I faint. Maybe pee my
self. But when Shawn comes back he puts the truck in gear and we move off.

  “That was interesting,” he says to Sera. We poke our heads out. “We’ve got another pickup to make. Route J. 4778 Knox,” he says. “The guy’s daughter is six months pregnant and she will be waiting in the garage on our regular pickup.”

  Shawn mumbles the route and address until he won’t forget it. He never writes anything down. Holding each other, Tia and I bump along until we feel the truck make a swooping turn and another turn. It halts and idles in the lot of a Jiffy Lube right behind the Perkins, next to the trash enclosure, shielded from the frontage road.

  “Stay down,” says Shawn. Then he says, “Easy, Tia, poke your head up a tad and look out the left-hand window, over my shoulder. Tell me if the car and the guy behind the wheel belong to you.”

  Tia eases her body past mine, carefully, until she’s looking out the window.

  “Yeah, that’s him.”

  Her voice is thick and teary, but what is there to say? We lock hands a moment.

  “Get out, now,’’ says Sera.

  “Walk, don’t run,” says Shawn.

  She’s out the door. I peek up over Shawn’s shoulder to see her approach the gray car, the shadowy man inside. She ducks in the passenger-side door. The car calmly reverses, turns, and rolls out of the parking lot. And that’s that. She’s gone, my Tia, that’s all there is.

  “Let’s fire it up,” says Shawn, pressing on the gas.

  * * *

  The Minneapolis Post Office, perhaps the only major Minnesota building built to withstand an earthquake, was made in 1934 out of Kasota stone, a golden pink rock quarried in Mankato, Minnesota. A number of other buildings in the city, new and old, are made from this unusually pleasant stone. I have noticed the rock. I think it gives buildings a warm feel in the harsh winter, a kind of glow, and I’ve always liked going to the post office for that reason. Also, it is stalwart looking for an art deco building. No decadent elegance. The post office has a broad-shouldered look. It was designed to be seen from a distance, approached slowly and with serious postal errands in mind, but it has been surrounded by the city, so now it looms beside you without warning.