The Rending and the Nest

by Kaethe Schwehn

  “Oh my God is that a DICK?!” Kat suddenly shrieked and everyone turned and laughed and she slapped a hand over her mouth and burrowed her head in feigned embarrassment in Zach’s shoulder.

  “Can I bum a cigarette?” I asked her. She handed me one and a lighter with She-Ra on it without taking her eyes off Zach’s phone, where apparently the dicks were growing bigger by the second. Likely, Zach’s was too.

  Out on the back patio I lit the cigarette, took a drag, and tried not to cough. Beer bottles sprouted like a field of beheaded daisies from the cement. At a table, one guy stared up at the underside of the patio umbrella while the other held up the paw of a tabby cat, making it wave at a girl who was busy not looking at either of them, lost behind a curtain of hair. I couldn’t see her face but I could see her hands, spinning a blue lighter in circles on the table. The guy with the cat finally noticed me. He turned the cat toward me and directed the wave at me. “Hey pretty lady,” he said.

  “Hey,” I said, avoiding eye contact and blowing out a thin stream of smoke. The one who’d been staring at the umbrella stood up from his chair and walked over to me. Curtsied, holding out an invisible skirt.

  “You’re supposed to bow, fag,” said the guy holding the cat. The curtsying guy took my hand, kissed it, and looked up at me. The ring through the middle of his nose made him look like an emaciated ox; I suddenly longed for the boys throwing the pretzels at the television screen.

  Then the guy with the cat stood. “Want a little pussy?” His walk toward me was almost graceful in its awkwardness, as though he were performing a dance about a prima ballerina who goes suddenly lame. It wasn’t until he was a few feet away from me that I realized the cat was dead. He held it by the scruff of its orange neck; its lower legs splayed out and a few pink nubs dotted its sagging belly. There were no noticeable gashes or broken bones, its eyes hadn’t been plucked out or invaded by curious ants—and the body wasn’t stiff.

  “Pet it,” he said.

  The girl at the table did not look up. She picked up the blackened spoon beside the lighter and raised it almost all the way to her lips before she realized it wasn’t a cigarette.

  “Pet it,” he said again. I reached out and gently stroked the cat between the eyes. In my memory, the body feels warm, though I couldn’t have known that from those two seconds of contact.

  “See? You think it’s a good kitty, don’t you?”

  The boy with the nose ring took the tail of the cat and ran it along his own cheek. “Soft.”

  “But then …” And at this point the boy holding the cat switched his grip, grabbing it around the throat with one hand and using the other to peel back the upper edges of its lips. The upper canines were clean and white. “Bad kitty!” He thrust the cat at my face. I took a step backward and they both laughed. At the table, the girl laid her head in her arms.

  I took a shaky drag of my cigarette in an attempt to regain my composure and realized my smoke was almost gone. Unfortunately the boy realized too. “Show her the perfect ashtray,” he said to the other boy, who dutifully tugged out the cat’s tongue. It was pink except for the places they’d already smudged with ash. “At your service,” said the nose ring boy.

  Nothing my parents had talked about had prepared me for how to deal with this. The question of whether to deface the body of a dead cat in order to get away from potential rapists had never come up at dinner. Music from the party pushed through the screen door, its own heartbeat. No one was going to come. I wasn’t even certain I was in danger. Wasn’t sure whether the threat of these boys was real or I was a goody-goody, overreacting.

  I said a little prayer for the cat and pressed my lit cigarette against its tongue. I closed my eyes at the moment of contact but I heard the sound, that small dying fizz. “Nice,” said one of them. I turned and went inside.

  My prayer for the cat, which went something like, “Dear God please forgive me for hurting this dead cat,” was the last prayer I said.

  The next morning, at church, I passed the offering plate, its smooth felt bottom like a little putting green. I watched a pink polka-dotted dress ride up the belly of a toddler as she squirmed in her mother’s arms, noted the short, feathered haircuts of the women and the neatly tucked shirts of the men; I mouthed the hymns, each verse returning to the same melody with slight alterations in content, words like risen and faithfulness and grace on my lips without any breath behind them. And the distance—between this world and the one I’d been in the night before—it was so far that I had to put my head between my knees. That my father was the one wearing the alb made me feel doubly remote from him.

  As a pastor’s kid, religion had always been a singular, predictable landscape, the backdrop wherever we traveled. But that day the landscape felt constructed; the rituals and liturgy and readings felt like flimsy set pieces meant to make suburban parents feel right about their lives.

  My father preached that Sunday on the text where Jesus walks across the water, saves a drowning Peter. Half that story spoke to me. I was Peter, the water clogging my throat, wind breaking the sky. But the previous night there had been no hand that I could see, reaching down from above, no grip on my forearm raising me up, showing me how to float above it all to some enclave of safety. For the first time in my life, God felt distant, unreachable.

  Three weeks later came the Rending, and along with it the departure of my belief in God altogether. Before the Rending I lived in a world of unconditional love: God’s love, my parents’ love. “No matter what!” my mom would say. “Even to the end of the world!” my dad would add.

  But here I was at the end of the world and that promised unconditional, abundant love did not prop me up, did not cover me at night with feathered, metaphorical wings.

  The first thing we did when we started Zion was to create the Rules. The Rules were the only Gospel I lived by now.

  I hung my scavenging shirt on a nail and slipped on a pale pink sweatshirt with rhinestones bedazzled around the collar and the cuffs. I was almost certain that everyone knew I wore the sweatshirt ironically (and practically, because the fabric was warm), but I always felt a little vulnerable in it. Like other Zionites were making snide remarks about it over their lukewarm tea in the Center. As if anyone cared anymore. That I even thought about that kind of thing now, three years after the Rending, twenty years old, embarrassed me further. On the floor, Lana rocked on her back, holding her feet in the air above her in the Happy Baby yoga pose. The tulle of her skirt fell over her chest, revealing her Superman underwear. Her lucky underwear that she only wore on days she didn’t see clients.

  “What if I don’t have a happy baby?”

  “Look around, Lana. There are no babies. Cal is the closest thing we have in Zion to a baby and he’s now seventeen. Everyone will go gaga over it.”

  “What if it doesn’t like me?”

  “Babies are genetically programmed to like their mothers.”

  Her feet made two muffled thumps as she released them to the floor. “What if I don’t want to be a mother, Mira? I’m supposed to have my own mother, here, to tell me how to do this. People are supposed to give me bibs and pacifiers. There’s supposed to be a class where they give me a baby doll and I learn how to hold it and feed it. I’m supposed to have a charming husband who feeds me ice chips and reminds me how to breathe. And it’s all supposed to be on purpose.”

  I lay down on my back on the floor next to her. Took her hand. Tears slid from the corners of her eyes.

  “Why isn’t anything on purpose anymore, Mira?”

  “I don’t know.”

  When I was thirteen, my mother and brother and I had to go with my father on a hospital visit. We’d been at a waterslide park. I loved swaying side to side down the chutes, the shriek of the child behind threatening, at every turn, to catch me. Then my father got a text. Two of his elderly parishioners had been in a car accident, then rushed to a hospital midway between the water park and our home. So my parents wrapped us in beach towel
s and scuttled us to the station wagon. My father disappeared into the hospital in flip-flops and swim trunks and a CROP Hunger Walk shirt. We sat in the car, windows rolled down, my mother trying to assiduously dole out the remaining snacks in the cooler: string cheese, graham crackers, juice boxes, fruit snacks. After an hour she took us inside, to the waiting room. Deposited us in chairs near a Lego table made for four-year-olds and told us not to move, not to bother our father. He was on the other side of the waiting room, beside a woman who wore glasses on a chain around her neck and whose flesh bubbled over the top of her compression socks. While my mother thumbed through a Redbook and six-year-old Bim divided the Legos by color, I watched my father. How he held the hand of the woman but didn’t say much. Just nodded. Nodded and nodded. He opened his mouth to say things occasionally, though I couldn’t hear exactly what. It was the same look he gave us when we hurt ourselves, when he told us to look him in the eye, not at the wound, his hands masterfully peeling the wrapper off bandages or unscrewing ointment bottles without unhinging his gaze from ours.

  I squeezed Lana’s hand. Lay beside her as quietly as I could.

  Hours passed. Likely only minutes but it felt like hours, because I was not as patient as my father, not as comfortable with silence.

  “Since you don’t know who the father is, maybe you could just give birth, name the baby something horrible, and give it to your least favorite former client.”

  Lana made a wet, snorting sound. “Here is baby Heimlich.”

  “Here is baby Guttersnut.”

  “Here is baby Grendel.”

  “Let’s ask Chester,” I said, pulling her to her feet.

  I shared my walls with Chester (to the right) and Asher (to the left). Asher and Rodney and Tenzin had designed the living quarters two and a half years earlier when we needed something fast. We expected we’d expand and remodel—but those were words from the Before, words that assumed that you existed in a world where basic necessities were taken care of, in a place where you didn’t have to use vacuum hoses and garbage cans to provide water for a clinic or roam spiderlike over Piles of objects in order to find something to patch a roof or bandage an arm. The rooms were like a scrawny version of the townhomes or row houses of the Before. A long rectangle divided width-wise into rooms, each with a door and window at one end that faced the Center and a fireplace at the back. Ten feet by fourteen feet. Asher wasn’t religious but he decided after the Rending that even numbers were best.

  Separating Chester from the rest of the world was a beaded curtain he’d fashioned out of junky necklaces from the apparel Sorting Station that no one else wanted. I often told him it made it look like he was a cheap hooker, though not when Lana was around. Chester claimed the necklaces would be gorgeous in the sunlight. All those beads acting as prisms. “There will be rainbows everywhere,” he’d say, gesturing around his rather barren space, “as soon as we get some sun.” This was Chester in a nutshell: 70 percent sarcasm and 30 percent wisdom. His portent of rainbows was both cheesy and ridiculous (we hadn’t had direct sunlight for three years) but the image, flecks of rainbow stippling the walls, the imperfect remains of beauty, this was appealing; there was something true and possible in that image. Chester, on rare occasions, offered the closest moments to hope I’d had since the Rending.

  The click of the flimsy beads announced our arrival.

  “Lana’s pregnant. We need awful baby names,” I said by way of introduction.

  Chester nodded, as though he’d been expecting all of this—our arrival, the pregnancy, my request. His blue eyes bulged slightly from his skull below an uneven bowl cut; even though some of the softness had gone from his cheeks in the past three years, he still looked boyish. He rose from the rocking chair where he’d been reading Marriage in the Balkans and turned to his bookshelf. Books were hard to come by in the Piles and we had yet to find literature of any sort. Anything medical in nature went to Sylvia and Ida, anything related to building or architecture to Asher. Anything mechanical to Tenzin or Rodney. Gardening to Marjorie and Sven. “Fun” reading went to the library in the Center. Chester got everything else.

  He brought The Danish Monarchy, Brewing Tea on Your Own Time, and Dogs Without Borders over to the coffee table. We flayed the pages to find names for Lana’s baby, calling them out as we held up the scraps, our voices buoyant as Santa calling his reindeer by name: Valdemar and Canute and Darjeeling and Bluetick! Basenji and Chow-Chow and Sencha and Earl Grey!

  None of us knew then what the Baby would be. Our minds swung back and forth between genders; we imagined a being that would cry, shit, suckle. But when we grew tired from tearing and laughing and Lana fell asleep on Chester’s rug and Chester went out for a walk, I collected the scraps, the names. I put them in a wallet with a fluorescent sunset on the side, ARIZONA spelled out in the rays of the falling sun.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I hadn’t yet found an examination table in the Piles but I had found a massage table and this is what Lana stretched out upon for her first prenatal exam. Ida and Sylvia’s Clinic was small but its own structure, apart from the Center and our rooms. Rodney and Asher and Tenzin had paid more attention to the infrastructure of the Clinic than the other buildings. Large windows in the exam room, lanterns for adequate light, attempts at plumbing that were still in progress. And many of my best finds went to the Clinic: a small pot-bellied stove, an industrial aluminum sink, a little IKEA table on wheels for the hodgepodge of instruments we’d managed to collect. On the other side of a floor-length curtain, the waiting room boasted three blue plastic stadium seats and a wicker rocker with an embroidered pillow (A GOLF PRO SITS HERE!). On a coffee table, Popular Mechanics, Bathroom Interiors, and Model Train Enthusiast were fanned out in an artful way that made it look like they’d never been moved. Behind the magazines, a ceramic sheep sprouted three fake daisies out of a hole in its back. The only comforting decorating choice was a rag rug, scraps in varying shades of yellow and orange, coiled tight as Sylvia’s interior. I was staring at the rug and Lana was rubbing her thumb over the ceramic bumps of the sheep when Sylvia pulled back the curtain and said, “We’re ready for you.”

  Lana rolled her eyes at me and stood. “And I am ready for you.” She nodded her head demurely at Ida and Sylvia, while she held out the skirt of her Fourth of July–themed June Cleaver dress (navy, white polka dots, American flags on the lapel). Along the back of the dress, big silver safety pins coaxed the extra-large dress around her narrow frame.

  Ida smiled and Sylvia opened the door of the stove and fed another log into the flames. I touched the small of Lana’s back to guide her to the table.

  The small of the back. The place on a human where a rudder should be. Or a tail. A point on the body that requires little pressure but moves the whole being forward and ahead. I’d seen men at church do it mostly, guiding their wives into a pew or through an open door. A couple my parents knew were walking hand in hand along a sidewalk when a car jumped the curb, killing the husband but leaving the wife perfectly unscathed. You can hold hands and still be two arm-lengths apart from a person. But the middle of the lower back, that point requires closeness, suggests intimacy, familiarity. It was the first place Rodney touched me: his hand, my back, only an hour after the Rending.

  I’d woken alone, on the floor of H&M, tucked between rows of cheap jewelry. The displays looked picked over, as though a massive horde of zirconium-hungry locusts had passed through while I took a nap on the tile floor. I reached up and touched a pair of earrings hanging slightly above my head and to the right. Huge gold hoops strung with enough baubles to drag a person’s ears to the floor. Do your ears hang low? Do they wobble to and fro? I giggled. I was like a gigantic baby pawing at a dysfunctional mobile.

  These were the few observations I managed before a face appeared over my face, a drop of sweat from that face falling directly onto my chin.

  “Get up,” said the face. The face was bristly.

  It suddenly seemed strange that I w
asn’t standing. Why wasn’t I standing? The face belonged to a man in a navy security uniform, walkie-talkie clipped to a pocket over which a gold badge read DOUG. I took his hand and stood. From my upright position I noted that the rest of the store looked like it had suffered a plague as well. Nothing was overturned. Nothing rumpled or broken. A turquoise blouse peppered with white elephants lay folded neatly on a display table next to me. In a mirrored alcove across the mostly empty room a single trench coat swayed in front of its own reflection, belt still neatly cinched. Everything else had vanished. There were no clerks behind the registers. There were no registers. No socked feet twisting and pirouetting below the changing room doors. No shhhhhtk shhhhhtk of hangers sliding over metal bars.

  I patted the pockets of my cargo pants reflexively as though maybe I had taken something. I had twenty dollars and a Burt’s Bees sparkling lip shimmer in one pocket. In my right hand I held the necklace I’d been admiring just before I decided to take a nap on the floor.

  “Something’s happened,” said Doug.

  “OK,” I said.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  “OK,” I said.

  Doug seemed to be in the know about something I had yet to grasp. A lone gunman or a terrorist attack. I couldn’t quite put the pieces together. Each thought had to be pressed through my brain like Play-Doh in Bim’s spaghetti maker.

  Bim.

  “I need to find my brother,” I said. I don’t remember being worried. I remember thinking my mother would be very angry with me. I imagined her in the food court, turning her thin silver watch around and around on her wrist.

  Doug nodded. “Description?” I rattled off a strange, abstract description of Bim that Doug repeated phrase by phrase into his walkie-talkie. When he released the button, static crackled back at us.

  “We’ll find him,” said Doug. He grabbed me by the upper arm and we began our procession around the mall. One store after another. Emptiness after emptiness. In Ann Taylor he took a pen with a daisy at the tip and stuck it behind my ear. “Puuuurrty,” he said, winking. His lips were big and red, almost purple; I was afraid they would burst, that whatever was inside his lips would get on me and I’d never get it off again. As we passed Bath and Body Works he yelled, “Get down!” I dropped to my belly and he lay on top of me, his growing erection pressing against my thigh. From Doc Popcorn he took a handful of caramel corn, made me eat it from his hand. “Sustenance,” he said and I could tell he was proud of the word. The caramel corn carried traces of whatever he’d been eating before, Funyuns or Fritos.