Even with the metaphor, I didn’t understand enough about building construction to truly realize the danger of living in a house without bones, but I did hate the idea of living in the wispy remains of other people’s lives. The people who had survived the Rending did not seem remarkable, special, or—oftentimes—sane.
We met Talia when we walked into a Zen Buddhist center with a gold-domed roof. The building was mostly empty. A few faded pillows, beige, bore the imprints of knees. The spice of incense lingered. A lone figure whirled up from kneeling as soon as we entered. She wore a black peasant skirt and a black shirt with embroidery that hung baggily across her chest. Her nose was pierced on both sides and she kept tucking her short, fine hair behind her ears as she talked. “I’ve been waiting for so long for someone to come and now here you are! Now here you are! I’m Talia.”
“I’m Ida.” Ida reached out her hand and Talia took it, rubbing her thumb over the knuckles.
“Look at your skin, Ida. It’s soft. And you must be her twin.” Talia took Sylvia’s hand too. “The skin is the same.” She raised each hand to her nose. “The smell of your skin is the same.” She smiled brightly at both of them.
Lana was straightening a painting of a cloud-haloed mountain on the other side of the room. Rodney, head tilted back, studied the rafters. Chester lifted his own hand to his face and made a mock sniffing noise in my direction.
“It’s very nice to meet you,” said Sylvia stiffly. She’d pinned her bangs back that day and her high, white forehead made it look like she was wearing a headlamp.
“Would you like some something to eat?”
“Sure,” said Chester.
Talia scurried away and came back with two Costco-size plastic jugs, one of raw almonds and one of wasabi peas. “This is all that was left. And some water. And a smidge of soy milk.” She held her fingers a half inch apart. We all took a handful of the almonds. “I’ve eaten so many almonds. My tongue starts to tingle on the back when I eat too many but I have to eat a lot, to stay alive, so I’ve gotten used to the tingling. There were pears too. A crateful. We were getting ready for the Dharma talk, just laying out the food and then—Bam!—I was the only one laying out the food but there was no food. No food but this”—she gestured at the Costco jugs—“and the pears. The pears I ate pretty quickly—which was not the best for my digestion. By quickly I mean in a couple days, not like, an hour or something.”
The sound of crunching filled the space. It was unclear whether Talia was always this chatty or whether being devoid of human companionship for three weeks had turned her a bit verbally manic. We ate more almonds. She continued.
“I don’t know what I thought afterward. I thought maybe it was a joke? Did you think it was a joke? Or maybe a test? Anyway, I walked around a little outside.” She gestured vaguely toward the windows with her hand. “And there was no one. I walked down the road to a gray Mazda and then I walked the other way to a Plymouth minivan. I sat in each for a while. I pressed all the buttons on the dash. Then I came back and ate more pears.” She paused as if trying to conjure the taste of a pear. As if the experience were already years in the past.
“Thanks, Talia. The almonds were delicious.” Rodney smiled at her, the branch moving slightly up his cheek.
Talia reached up. “I love this,” she breathed.
Rodney tilted his head to the right to crack his neck and Talia pulled her hand away sharply. “We should go,” he said.
Chester looked at his watch, sighed, and nodded as though we had a babysitter waiting. Lana and Ida and Sylvia mumbled thank-yous and followed Chester and Rodney. I was screwing the lid back on the almond container politely when Talia covered my hand with hers. In a quiet voice with none of her earlier squeaky modulations she said, “I have to tell you about the other thing that happened.” She must have seen my eyes dart toward the others because she squeezed my knuckles and said, “Please.”
“OK,” I said.
“A man came here with a woman while I was out walking around. I heard their voices when I came back in and I was going to introduce myself when I heard her start to cry and scream. So I hid instead. Over there.” She gestured toward a supply closet. “I hid in there for a full day and listened to what he did to her and I didn’t do anything. Do you know what I thought about? I thought about how if he opened the door of the closet he would see me and he would do to me whatever he was doing to her and then when I peed myself I worried that he would smell me. And I pretended the noises she was making were other things: bird calls, a baby, an electrical saw, a little boy singing. Finally I fell asleep and when I woke up they were gone. I didn’t help her and I didn’t even let myself hear her. I need you to know the kind of person I am.”
I took her hand between both of mine. “You were afraid. You didn’t know what to do,” I said. “None of us really knows what to do. We’re doing the best we can.”
“But I wasn’t. I mean, I didn’t do the best that I could have. It turns out that’s the kind of person I am.”
I thought of all the things my father might have said: that God keeps giving us opportunities to do the right thing; that we are all both sinners and saints; that courage takes practice.
Instead I said, “I’m glad you’re coming with us,” and led her out.
As soon as we emerged below the blowsy gray sky the sliver of vulnerability I’d seen disappeared and her wheedling crystal-vendor voice returned. “Is there a plan exactly? Do we know where we’re going?”
“No. I’m Mira and I don’t know where we’re going,” I said, trying on the cadence of an AA meeting.
Talia didn’t catch on. “Well, no worries, Mira, because I’m Talia and I don’t know where I’m going either! I used to have a bumper sticker on my Jeep. My Jeep that was right here, in fact,” she said, gesturing at a parking place where a spot of motor oil still held its shape, “and the sticker said NOT ALL WHO WANDER ARE LOST. Maybe that would be a good thing to hold at the front of our thoughts as we walk.”
Chester and Rodney and Lana were at least fifty feet down the road already. Lana looked over her shoulder and wiggled her fingers at me.
“I lead meditation here. I did. So if people want me to lead meditation as we walk, just say so. I’m also excellent at brewing tea. I can make a mean tea out of almost anything. Truly.”
She was right about the tea and the meditation. These were the only two things Talia was really qualified to do. Well, three things: tea, guided meditation, and incessant talking.
We stopped walking because none of us could stand Talia anymore. Because we wanted to build a room and put her inside it and close the door.
Inside the Center, at a long rectangular folding table near the fire, the three current visitors were helping Talia with food prep. We were generally in charge of our own food preparation; or rather, if we wanted to eat our chosen root vegetable in some version other than Recently Untucked from the Coals of a Fire, we had to do it ourselves. But occasionally, in order to keep visitors occupied, we asked them to mash turnips as their contribution to community life. We didn’t let the visitors use knives, however, so their efforts were often slow and pathetic.
The visitor with the cast-iron eyes I’d seen in the Clinic was peeling sweet potatoes with his fingernails, pulling down the skin in slow vertical motions like a cat at a post. He didn’t look at the potato while he worked; his eyes flitted around the room, resting on me then Talia then Lana then Cal (reading a magazine on an inflatable pool float in the corner). Then he’d scan the objects in the room: the haphazard collection of tables and chairs, the huge bin full of vegetables, the three different pots raised just above the tendrils of the fire, the collection of ceramic mugs, the pile of burnable objects, the glass ashtray Massey, another visitor, was using to mash the potatoes, the cookie tins filled with spice bottles in front of the visitor beside him. I couldn’t tell whether his spastic glancing was some kind of nervous tic or he was cataloguing, the way I did with the Piles, taking stock a
nd making notes inside his squirming brain.
Massey stood on his right. He’d been in Zion six nights already so tonight would be his last. He looked like a man auditioning for the role of Navy SEAL in a movie: shorn blond hair, square face, muscled girth straining against a gray army sweatshirt. He’d come to Zion looking for his daughter.
“Wait, don’t tell me,” said Massey, setting down the ashtray. He pointed to me. “Myrna?”
“Mira,” I said politely.
“Mira! Yes! And La—. La—”
“Lana,” said Lana, turning away from his obvious wink and toward the bookshelf where we kept puzzles, games, and other sundry distractions.
“How’re you ladies doin’?” He had the edge of a Texan accent but we couldn’t tell whether it was real or affected.
“Fine,” I said.
“Candy Land,” said Lana, holding up the box before nudging me to the table farthest away.
“Well, don’t let things get out of hand with those marshmallow houses or whatnot. Some of us got work to do over here.”
I offered a half-hearted military salute in response.
“I know Massey. Who are the other two?” whispered Lana as we sat down.
“The short one with the spices came two days ago. He’s got a mangled hand and hasn’t spoken much; won’t say his name. Ida calls him Starfish because that’s what his hand looked like all splinted out. He seems harmless.” I shrugged. We paused to watch Starfish cup a spice bottle to his side with his thickly bandaged hand so that his good hand could unscrew the lid. He was responsible for adding flavor to the mostly obliterated potatoes after Massey worked his magic with the ashtray.
“Is he using basil?” Lana made a face. Pulled up her legs so she was sitting cross-legged. Spine a line to the clouds, as she liked to say at yoga. “How about the other one? Who we saw in the Clinic with Sylvia?”
“Neither has tried to see you?” I asked, surprised. Lana refused to see visitors as clients. Too risky. But almost all of the male visitors seemed to intuit her chosen occupation, even before they noticed the red bandana that periodically waved from the hook beside her door. Even from across the room, I knew how different our bodies looked, hers lifted, statuesque, graceful, and mine compact and practical. She was a swan and I was a Geo Metro. She belonged on an urn; I belonged on a MISSING CHILD—TWENTY YEARS LATER poster, the computer-generated kind in which you can still see bits of the child pressing through the features but the adult version looks strange, never quite beautiful. This is what I thought every time I caught my own reflection in Lana’s room, even as Lana tried to convince me of the appeal of the strafing of freckles across my nose or the way, no matter how I pulled my chestnut hair back, small wisps crept out and curled around the edges of my features. She said it looked angelic, but I didn’t want anything to do with angels or their aesthetic representations.
“Massey came nosing around but not the other two. Your turn.”
I moved my game piece down the colored path toward a gummy-looking cartoon girl clutching a fist full of lollipops.
“He came to my room. Stood outside. Showed me the picture of his daughter.”
“Lexie,” I supplied.
“Whatever. He showed it to me again. Said he was feeling sad. That it was hard not to have a loving woman’s touch.”
“He did not use the words ‘loving woman’s touch.’ ”
“He did! So I told him I’d heard there were a lot of children somewhere south of here. Near a large body of water.”
“You didn’t say that.”
“I did.” Lana drew a card and then moved her marker two pink spaces forward. “His eyes got kind of sparkly when I said it and I felt a little bad. But he’s been looking for her for more than three years. It’s what he’s going to keep doing anyway. Why not throw him a little hope.”
“False hope.”
“Who cares anymore?”
“I do.”
“Of course you do, my highly ethical friend,” she said, reaching over and pinching one of my angelic cheeks, “but the real kind of hope isn’t exactly forthcoming, is it?”
Her pinch was slightly harsher than it needed to be—though whether out of a personal sense of desperation or a desire to chastise me I wasn’t sure. Her fingers smelled like the guava-coconut body lotion I’d found a few weeks earlier.
I felt the stillness of the visitors before I noticed that Rodney had entered the room. He and Massey nodded at each other. Starfish looked away from Rodney’s glance, sort of curled in on himself. Cast Iron paused for a second but then kept his eyes on Rodney while skinning another sweet potato.
Rodney’s presence was so familiar to me that I sometimes forgot how massive he was. He was bigger than Massey but lacked Massey’s chiseled physique. Rodney’s body always looked to me as if he had emerged directly out of a hillside, out of moss and bark and earth. He cut his own hair when it got in his eyes by lifting fistfuls and cutting it as close to his scalp as he could. The look was not uniform. The hair combined with the tattoo made him look feral and strange. Immediately after the Rending, when I first met Rodney, he wasn’t garrulous but he was companionable, friendly. But as our fledgling community attracted more and more people, he became less accessible, at least to the new members and to visitors.
Now he and Tenzin, having returned from a hunting trip, stood before the refrigerator door on which we’d drawn a rough map of Zion and the surrounding area. When anyone left the area for a community-prescribed reason, the person was supposed to put a magnet in the general area he or she expected to be. If the person didn’t return, we’d know where to start looking. If you left Zion for other reasons and you didn’t return, no one would come looking (Rule #3). They clicked their magnets back to the home circle of Zion; Tenzin drifted over to solicit tea from Talia (silly man) and Rodney pulled a chair up to our table.
“Wanna get in on this?” asked Lana.
“Not sure he can handle the intensity,” I said.
“Probably not,” he said, “but gee whiz I’d sure like to try.”
“Gee whiz?” I said.
“Gosh darn that sounds super-duper,” said Lana.
“I’m trying to swear less,” said Rodney.
“Why?” said Lana.
Rodney shrugged. He had a strange sense of decorum about certain things. He was big on please and thank you but had two hundred ways to describe a bowel movement. It wasn’t unusual to hear him telling Asher about the size and shape of the deuce he’d just dropped before asking him to please pass the Philips screwdriver. I’d known him for three years now and I still found myself watching the way his jaw shifted side to side when he was deep in thought, the way he handled the little plastic gingerbread man delicately. I could have written a paean to the veins on the backs of his hands, to my desire to press a section of the vein flat, that tiny soft give of skin. When he started to bounce his right knee and Lana said, “Candy Land earthquake! My ginger man is terrified!” and then, when he didn’t stop, “Rodney, quit it,” I put my hand on his leg, under the table, to still him. He put his hand on top of mine and we stayed that way for the rest of the game.
Lana finally wandered off to attend to her client. Rodney stayed a few extra minutes to help me put the game away, squaring the cards into an orderly pile. He looked at me, from time to time, green eyes with brown knit in behind. These moments between us were common. He wasn’t waiting, exactly; he was creating a pause, holding his foot between the door and the frame, a slim rectangle of space in which I could change my mind. He didn’t raise his eyebrows or sputter little half-sentences, he just went about making a pile of the cards: two squares of yellow, one square of red, two squares of green, one square of red. He chose the cards carefully, following a pattern in his head. He was never showy about knowledge, was more apt to tell about the classes he’d failed in high school, how shop had saved him, how he’d completed a year at Dunwoody College, had decided his specialty would be machine tool technology. But, li
ke Chester’s, Rodney’s mind was always working, and if there wasn’t a puzzle in front of him he often created one for himself or a way of organizing things to make meaning out of them. I watched him, smoothing the board with my hand like a freshly ironed sheet. I couldn’t fill the space with what he wanted to hear and I couldn’t pull myself away either. Finally he put the lid on the box. We both smiled at the tiny gasp of air the lid made going down.
“Thanks for the game, Mira.”
“Yes,” I said, “of course. Anytime.”
Then he was gone and I was left with the two children on the front of the box, a boy and girl with identical blond hair and dewy eyes, chins propped thoughtfully on fists, eyes scooping heavenward, imagining molasses swamps and sugarplum fairies.
I missed Bim.
Bim was short for Bartholomew. Specifically, the Dr. Seuss Bartholomew with all the hats. My parents tried to call him Bart for short but by eighteen months he would point rather sternly at the front of his OshKosh overalls and say “Bim” over and over again until we repeated his chosen name back to him. On the day of the Rending we were at the Mall of America to buy Bim a back-to-school wardrobe. Bim was ten and unenthusiastic about trying on jeans and chinos and choosing between the shirt with the army fatigue pattern and the shirt with flames licking the armpits. He kept coming out of the dressing room with the neck of a shirt over his head like a nun’s habit or with the waist of his pants hiked to his upper ribs and his finger knuckle-deep in a nostril. When my mother grew annoyed, Bim turned sulky. Rather than asking when we could go to Nickelodeon Universe, the amusement park at the center of the mall, he took to repeating “pleeeez” in a thin reedy voice as we walked from store to store. Finally, my mother turned, handed me a twenty, and said, “Take him.” A few feet from us she turned again and said, “Food court. One hour.” I nodded and we were off.
The Rending and the Nest Page 4