The Rending and the Nest

by Kaethe Schwehn

  I was aware, in that mall corridor, of every guy my age who walked past. I charted the way they let their flip-flops slap extra loudly against their heels, the way, from the waist up, they were always swiveling—to talk to one another, to watch a girl pass, to gesture to something in a store window. I tried to stay focused, small, narrow. Only my eyes darted everywhere. Sometimes my glance fell against a boy’s and stuck, for a second, before we passed one another. It was constant cataloguing and assessment. I was on the lookout, though I wouldn’t have admitted it to myself at the time, was searching for the person whose eyes would find mine, catch, and stay with me. Some I dismissed: too much acne, hips wide like a woman’s, too much cologne. And I saw from the way their eyes scooted over me that I was being dismissed too, by some of them. I felt the dismissal in my body—the place where my thighs rubbed together as I walked, the tiny swell of fat over the edge of my bra, the hideous knob on my left pinky toe that made Bim refer to me as “witch foot” whenever I went barefoot (which was rarely).

  Bim, on the other hand, was busy rolling his body along railings, balancing momentarily on the edge of the pedestrian benches, and jumping against walls. He called this freestyle walking. I saw some of the boys I passed guffawing at him and then sailing their eyes over to me, connecting us. The heat started below my collarbone and by the time we reached Nickelodeon Universe my face was flaming.

  I handed Bim the twenty so he could get tickets, then waited while he stood in line for the Log Chute and the Swings. He was saving the Infinity Coaster for last. The line for the coaster seemed to snake into infinity as well. Just across the corridor from where the line trailed off, H&M mannequins flaunted gauzy dresses cinched with slim brown belts.

  “I’m going to browse,” I told Bim, nodding toward the store. “If you get done and I’m not here just wait.”

  I wasn’t thinking of Bim. I was thinking of Jess, a guy I hated in theory but found myself attracted to in practice, and I was thinking of Liz, a girl who was my friend in theory but a bitch in practice, and I was thinking of the way Liz had curved her head around my locker and said, “Jess says you’d actually be cute if you didn’t dress so dykey.” I remember, as I said good-bye to Bim, fingering the scarf I was wearing that day, gray with silver filigree, and I remember thinking that maybe the scarf wasn’t enough, but maybe a necklace would do it. Feminine with a little edge.

  That’s what I was thinking when I said, “Just wait.”

  Then I was in H&M, a necklace with elongated diamonds draped across my palm. I was admiring those little silver daggers. My last thought before the Rending wasn’t of Bim, it was of how Jess would nod slightly in approval when he saw me wearing the necklace. How his eyes would dart and catch mine and stay. That’s the last thing I remember thinking.

  I took a sweet potato from the collection beside the fire pit before I left the Center. Tried, and failed, to leave without Talia touching me (as I bent over the potatoes I felt her hand on my hair, stroking me like a cat: “It’s lovely when you wear it down like this, Mira.”). I ate it on one of the three blue plastic stadium seats that stood outside between Chester’s room and mine, dropping the potato peelings into an orange jack-o’-lantern pail at my feet. I waved to Eleanor and Cassie as they crossed the quadrangle with a load of root vegetables in the canoe-mobile. Figuring out how to attach bicycle wheels to the aluminum vessel was Asher’s proudest post-Rending moment. It was a bitch to steer but Eleanor and Cassie were pros.

  “Those two look like the beginning of a joke,” said Chester, plopping down beside me.

  “You’re terrible,” I said, but he was right. Eleanor was an unbelievably kind person who resembled, according to Chester, a home-schooled heron. She lifted each spindly knee about three times higher than it actually needed to go as she waded her way across the matted grass. Cassie, pushing against a bar Asher attached to the rear of the canoe-mobile, refused all clothing that didn’t feature sequins or glitter of some sort. A fashion choice completely antithetical to her personality. Chester picked up the bucket and started to nibble on bits of peel.

  “Yuck.”

  He smiled a jack-o’-lantern grin, having somehow managed to cover a few of his teeth with potato skin.

  “Lovely,” I said. “Thanks for saving me a trip to the compost.”

  He ran his tongue over his teeth. Then held out a closed fist. I popped the last bit of warm potato in my mouth, then turned his hand over and peeled back his fingers one at a time to reveal the folded piece of paper, still slightly damp from his sweat. My daily fortune. I opened it and read: “If you are among the fortunate people who live where choice serviceberries abound, don’t fail to notice them this summer.” I looked up from the paper. “I’ve always wanted to live where serviceberries abound.”

  Chester nodded faux-pensively.

  “Thanks,” I said, rolling my eyes but tucking the fortune into my pocket anyway.

  Sometimes I resented Chester. Somehow he managed to make his community work out of not-doing rather than doing. He still talked openly to Lana and me, and to Rodney, Sylvia, and Ida if the occasion arose, but around everyone else he was quiet—and not just quiet like Rodney was quiet; Chester was entirely silent. At community meetings I watched other people watch his face, tracking him for clues about how they should think, when they should grow indifferent or angry or sympathetic. Most of the time, I thought his spiritual guru persona was an act he put on because he could, because it made him feel powerful or useful or permitted him to be lazy. But at other times I felt it too, a more-ness to him, a beyond-ness. I hate those sorts of vague abstractions; they make me feel like I should be selling Enneagram books in a shop reeking of patchouli (perhaps this is my father in me; he had a particular distaste for those who deemed themselves “spiritual but not religious”). But I did find comfort in Chester. Other than Asher he was the only man after the Rending whose gaze didn’t veer toward my breasts at some point during the conversation. Maybe Chester was asexual. I never asked. I was just content to be near someone who never seemed to want something from me. Sitting beside Chester, watching the Piles dim as the light turned from heather gray to softened steel, tracking the other community members as they walked across the quadrangle, was like sitting next to a large body of water.

  His room was the same as mine, the same as (almost) all of ours, door and window at the front, fireplace at the rear. Though the temperature never sank to a level where fire was necessary for survival, some days the chill worked its way into our bones; on those occasions it was nice to fall asleep beside a source of warmth. So I kept my pallet laid out in front of the fire ring and then positioned a series of shelves, filled with bizarre but useless objects I’d found in the Piles, between the pallet and the rest of the room so that there were two separate spaces. Lana did the same, though her bed and living space were separated by burgundy drapes held back with golden ties with fluttery tassels. Chester kept his bed rolled away during the day. Perpendicular to the fireplace, a long coffee table held a small silver mixing bowl with his most recent treasures. The other mixing bowls (a set) stood in an even line on the counter in front of the window: water for washing, water for drinking, and ghost fruit.

  Every Sunday, Ida and Chester went for long walks, Chester with his fanny pack and Ida with a white wicker basket (so that she looked like she was perpetually hunting for Easter eggs). Ida mostly gathered whimsical items—a pinwheel, a Whoopee cushion, potholders with the faces of owls. Chester veered toward the mildly disturbing: retainer shaped to the roof of a mouth we’d never met, glass eye, pin from an artificial leg (the leg itself wouldn’t fit in his bowl), hearing aid. Around his coffee table were places to sit; the rest of the room was taken up with his stacks. Perfectly aligned stacks of paper, books, folders, pamphlets.

  I don’t think Chester intended to stop talking. I think it’s that he found that’s what people wanted. A sounding board, a silent sage, a sponge. We wanted our mothers and fathers, our confidants and priests, o
ur therapists and friends. When Chester listened to me, really listened, I could shut my eyes and feel like I was with someone from the Before. He helped make a space of intimacy that felt familiar; people came to him again and again for the opportunity to pour themselves out, to fall and be caught. When Chester had heard enough he’d move purposefully to one of his stacks and rip out a passage from a book or a pamphlet, a folder or brochure. Then he’d offer the writing—sometimes just a few words, sometimes half a page—to the lucky Zionite. I’d often see members of Zion removing the scrap surreptitiously, in a moment of privacy, mouthing the words he’d given them like a charm. He took the interactions he had with community members and visitors seriously. However banal their questions or concerns, he never mentioned them to Lana or me afterward. Like Lana with her clients, Chester kept his listening sessions private, holy.

  I wonder what my father would have thought of this. He loved literature and poetry. But sometimes it felt eerie to me, sacrilegious somehow, when Chester set the words of a popcorn popper manual or a Thai takeout menu as a seal upon someone’s heart, when he made a balm out of crossword clues and vaccination side effects. Of course, considering I’d given up both God and religion, I shouldn’t have cared whether something felt sacrilegious; still, watching the profane slide into the sacred (and vice versa) unsettled me.

  Religion didn’t disappear after the Rending but it went private, underground. We decided early on that the Rules that governed our behavior in Zion wouldn’t be religious in nature. They could not be derived from a desire to pacify a driftless, invisible unknown. Or unknowns. Nor could the Rules be premised on why the Rending had or hadn’t happened and, based on those ungrounded hypotheses, what we might do to prevent further catastrophe. We were still close enough to the Before to remember cults and to look around at our few numbers and our desperation for meaning and realize we could slide quickly into bizarre behavior meant as a hopeful attempt to keep the unthinkable at bay.

  Though religion was banished from the center of our lives, it retained a firm toehold in the peripheries. Marjorie and Sven, our married orchardists, built little altars made of odds and ends from the sorted piles and left them behind their room for Zionites to take free of charge. Most people didn’t take them in the light of day, but many of us had one in our rooms, and used it as a place to display whatever objects we’d had on us when the Rending occurred: grocery list, wallet-size photo of a Labrador, Clorox wipes, guitar pick, quarters and dimes piled like little cairns. Items that had no real use in the After other than as touchstones for memory.

  Zephyr, our mixture man, had spent two years with the Peace Corps in Nepal as a twentysomething and retained an amalgam of religious habits that, like his mixtures, seemed to have no recipe but still managed to cohere his inner world. He and Tenzin and Talia and a few others practiced meditation in the Center on Tuesday evenings; Lana ushered a handful of Zionites through yoga beside the river three mornings a week. Those who needed a prophet went to Chester. For a while, a small group cobbled together a Christian liturgy, a smattering of prayers and creeds, hymns and blessings. But there was no bread and there was no wine and the substitutes, Marjorie told me, felt wrong on the tongue. And besides, she said, there wasn’t anyone to lead them, and Christians like a good shepherd.

  It wouldn’t have been hard to tell them about my father, but that would have meant admitting that I knew many psalms by heart, that I’d heard my father preach enough sermons that I knew the tightrope walk of law and gospel, knew how to take a Bible story and shape it to the people who were listening, knew that a prayer was exposing the soft belly of fear to light. I knew telling them about my father would mean they would want things from me that I didn’t want to give, would mean they would ask things of me that I didn’t have answers for, would mean that on a daily basis I’d have to submerge myself in memories of the Before. And, because I hadn’t found a Bible in the Piles, I’d be responsible for remembering what was important, I would need to get everything right. And I’d need to pretend I was a person of faith, that I offered prayers to things besides dead cats. I’d need to pretend I believed in an abundant unconditional love that saturated everything, that stalked us everywhere. I’d need to say, with a compassionate face, that resurrection was possible.

  I didn’t join the Christians, but every Sunday until the group dispersed I spent my mornings close enough to them that I could hear the rise and fall of hymns, the soft, book-shut sound of the “Amens.”

  I’d never talked with any Zionites about how my belief in God disappeared along with most of the world’s population. I’d never told anyone my father was a pastor. I’d never lied either, I simply didn’t graft that part of who I was onto the version of Mira that I became when I woke in the Mall of America, the H&M necklace clutched in one hand, the security officer panting above me, and Bim gone for good.

  And, stupidly, it didn’t occur to me that other members of Zion might have similarly curated their own pasts, track lighting and gleaming pedestals for the parts of themselves they wanted to remember and temperature-controlled basement storage for the parts of themselves they would just as soon forget.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Two days later I met Lana on my way out to Larry, the Pile closest to the river. Cal was trailing along somewhere behind me, annoyed that I’d made him push the baby buggy. I’d passed the other members of Lana’s morning yoga class already—Paloma and Cassie and Zephyr and Talia—and now here was Lana, rag rug rolled under her arm, blonde hair rerolled into perfect little knobs, cheetah lounge pants, zebra-striped hoodie (she called her yoga outfit safari couture), and a cut that started at the edge of her lip and curled like a fishing hook just above her chin.

  “What happened?”

  She batted the question away like smoke rising from leftover food on a burner. Annoying but no real cause for concern. “It’s fine.”

  “It doesn’t look fine.” In fact it did look fine, but there was something about the cut that didn’t look accidental.

  “Sylvia and Ida pronounced it officially OK.”

  “You went to the Clinic on your own? Without being dragged?”

  “I was dragged a little maybe.”

  “Who?”

  “Rodney.”

  “Rodney did this?”

  “Rodney did not.”

  “Then who?”

  Her voice turned a few notches chillier. “This question from the girl who somehow carries a map of a million objects in her head, whose powers of observation are unsurpassed.”

  “A visitor?” Massey was gone. Starfish was lame. “The creepy one? With the eyes?”

  “Ding ding ding. You win. I’m off. Always something to be done. Always someone to be done,” she corrected herself. There was bitterness there I hadn’t heard before. She started to walk by me but I grabbed her arm. She pushed me quickly, reflexively, and I stumbled back.

  “Hey!”

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Blew it out slowly. When she opened her eyes again the edge was gone. “Sorry.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Who?”

  “Rodney.”

  “Rodney is escorting a certain visitor hence.” She did the little wave again.

  “Hence?”

  “Elsewhere.”

  “Alone?”

  “I believe Tenzin went along.”

  “And the visitor did this?”

  She shrugged. “He got a little fresh. As my mother would say. Would have said.”

  “Are you OK? I don’t mean the cut—I mean you. Are you OK?”

  “Part of the gig,” she said. She smiled but the smile cracked open the cut, turning the scab from rust to red.

  I took her hands. “Did he rape you?”

  She looked over my shoulder. “He did not,” she said brightly.

  “Did he assault you?”

  This time she looked at me and touched my nose as she said, “I’m sorry but you are out of guesses, missy. The vacation t
o Disney World shall not be yours.”

  “Why won’t you talk to me?” She studied the sky above my head. “Lana.”

  After a long moment she turned her gaze to mine. Her voice was that of a fifth-grade math teacher, kind but firm. “He was fresh. Rodney was nearby. Now the visitor is hence. That is all.”

  That night at the community meeting Tenzin distributed our portions of meat from what he and Rodney had collected from the snares. If they returned earlier in the day, Talia usually had time to make a stew, which mellowed the meat, turning it soft and pliable. But Tenzin and Rodney hadn’t returned until a couple hours before the meeting so there was barely time to butcher and cook the carcasses and the meat was tough. Sounds of chewing filled the first few minutes of the meeting. I tried to swallow. It had been four days since we’d had any protein and I was hungry but I couldn’t get it down.

  Lana didn’t even try the meat. She spent most of the community meeting that night giving herself a manicure with a red Sharpie I’d found inside a green glass vase on Curly, the tallest Pile, a few days earlier. I breathed in the fumes (a weird sort of nostalgia) and tried to patch one of my scavenging shirts with fishing line. Or I pretended to patch the shirt. Rodney was sitting one row behind me and I felt his gaze on the backs of my ears, on my hair, on the tender skin at the curve of my jaw.