The Rending and the Nest

by Kaethe Schwehn

  “So please don’t take your mug with you,” Talia was saying, “otherwise we have no mugs in the Center.”

  “Tragedy,” breathed Lana over her fingernails.

  “To help you remember I’ve marked all the Center mugs with a C and I’ve made a sign that I’m going to hang above the mugs.” She held up a lampshade and rotated it so that we could see the words that wrapped around its pale yellow skirt: ALL MUGS WHO WANDER ARE LOST.

  “Thanks, Talia,” said Asher. “Anyone else? Going once … going twice … no more announcements? OK, on to Rules. Any additions or addendums?” Asher fiddled with his baseball cap. He always hung it over the knob of his knee when he was the community meeting leader, revealing the wavy peaks of his thick red hair.

  Zephyr raised his finger in the air. Asher nodded. Zephyr stood, right hand cupped around the stick he used to stir his mortars and plasters and glues. “We’ve been getting a lot more visitors lately seems like. So I think we’ve either gotta not feed and house them all or we’ve gotta think about maybe not letting them stay so long.”

  Rule #4 stated that we would offer food and shelter to any visitor for seven days, after which point he or she either had to leave or join Zion officially. We developed the rule not out of an overwhelming sense of hospitality but as a means of protecting ourselves. Our rationale was that most people who approached with ill intent could be pacified by offers of generosity. So far, it had worked. I glanced at the scab on Lana’s chin. Or mostly worked.

  “I think Zephyr is right,” said Sylvia. She sat with her hands wedged between her crossed legs, back straight, the toe of her black lace-up boot diagramming molecules in the air. At least that’s what I imagined she was doing.

  “I think the problem isn’t so much the number of visitors,” said Rodney, casting a glance toward Lana, “it’s where we house them.” At the moment we had four cots in an otherwise empty room dedicated to visitors. If we had more than four visitors we rolled out pallets in the Center. “Putting them so near to where we sleep seems like it might invite trouble.”

  “Maybe we should build a whole separate guest facility,” said Lana, fluttering her hand in the air, her nails like detached butterfly wings.

  Across the room, Tenzin made a sputtering sound. “I don’t think we want to make it seem like we’re in the hotel business.”

  “Well,” said Rodney, “what if we put up a really simple structure out by the ghost fruit orchard? Barely serviceable but with some kind of bunk system.”

  “More people but less comfort,” added Tenzin, nodding.

  “Yep,” said Rodney.

  “And what if,” said Ida, a slow sweet smile spreading across her face, “we put it at the north end of the orchard, within wafting distance of the latrines?”

  “OK,” said Asher, “let’s return to this idea next week. We’ll vote then. Any other additions or addendums?”

  It was quiet except for the sound of Lana’s Sharpie lid clicking back into place. I watched a few of the community members on the other side of the room watch Chester.

  Asher readjusted the hat on his knee. “Issues and Ideas then?”

  The last part of the meeting was the most haphazard. Initially, it was the time for us to share theories about the Rending. Mostly, it was a way to make sure that no one was turning cultish on us, that no insane bit of gossip or harebrained theory had a chance to gain traction as it snowballed from whispered conversation to whispered conversation.

  We were rabid for theories in the first year after the Rending, desperate to land on a story that could explain the sudden absence of most of the world’s population, the redistribution of goods and objects into towering Piles, and the ghost fruit. We wanted to know why we were constantly suffocated by gray sky, why the temperature hovered between fifty and sixty degrees, why precipitation had ceased and been replaced by the periodic saturation of the earth from sources unknown. Toward the end of the second year we added the lack of children to the mix. We considered terrorism, drugs sent through pipes and vents, an astronomical event, a compression or expansion of time. We wondered if the absent people had been taken elsewhere, if they were being kept. Tenzin once told us he’d had a dream that the bodies had become a mass in the ocean, like the mile-long pile of garbage some of us had seen pictures of before the Rending. We strained the facts, sieved them for truth, looked for patterns, salvation. Zephyr once pointed out at the end of a particularly long meeting that maybe we weren’t the ones who had been saved at all. “I had a niece who was really into that Left Behind series,” he said. “Maybe it’s the Rapture and we haven’t been brought up.”

  One meeting we spent offering up details from our lives, looking for overlap like detectives on Law and Order who eventually found that all the serial killer’s victims attended the same health club or had been born on December 26. But as one year turned to two and two into three, as we developed a reasonably comfortable way to live, as our distance from the event dimmed its violence slightly, we stopped talking about the possible causes publicly. Or maybe we never grew comfortable, but we tired of continually circling the same questions, living in a psychic land of dangling conclusions, ellipses trailing off forever into the distance.

  “Nada?” said Asher, slapping his hat against his knee a final time for emphasis and then replacing it on his head. “Then we is done. That’s all, folks.”

  We got up from our makeshift benches and grabbed our lanterns. The world had grown dark, its oldest habit, since the meeting began. We drifted to the fire. I lit my red candle stub, ground it into the sand at the base of the coffee can, and walked out the door alone. Chester was listening deeply to Deborah, who was holding on to the cuff of his shirt as she talked. Lana had slipped away with a client; evenings were her busiest time. I watched the homemade lanterns, coffee cans and Mason jars, sugar shakers and soup cans, drift across the quadrangle, each bit of light on its own trajectory.

  I touched the notebook that hung between my breasts. The list of what we needed, what we hoped we might find. But at moments like this I added, at the back, my own catalogue of the missing.

  Contrails on blue. The drone of plane engines. Stars.

  “A litany,” my father would have said.

  As though naming the things you’d lost could be a blessing. As though he had any say in the matter now.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The next few months were different than the previous three years because time began to mark itself, visibly, on Lana’s body, like notches in a stick or hash marks carved on a cell wall. The expansion of Lana’s frame reminded all of us that each day was not repeating exactly; we were moving forward, into something different.

  At thirty-two weeks Lana was proud to announce that she could feel a tiny elbow below her skin, proud to guide Sylvia’s hand just there. Lana closed her eyes and smiled a tiny smile of deep maternal satisfaction; Sylvia looked at me as she said, “Yes, there’s certainly something sharp growing there.” We both knew something was off, not right, but I give Sylvia credit for not sounding alarm bells she wouldn’t be able to silence. Ida dutifully recorded all of it in the blue book, often writing far longer than seemed necessary given what had happened in the room.

  As Sylvia and I grew more sparing with our enthusiasm, Lana’s interest in her belly swelled. She called the fetus Percocet, or Perky for short, because of a gift Chester and I made for her the week we’d learned she was pregnant. Instead of a typical book that compared the size of the fetus to a fruit or a vegetable, Chester and I had created our own version, each week a different object from the Before, something we hadn’t managed to find in the Piles. Your baby is the size of a painkiller! Your baby is the size of a Frosted Flake! Your baby is the size of a scoop of Cherry Garcia! We’d consulted Ida and Sylvia since we had no idea what size the baby was supposed to be when. Ida had giggled; Sylvia had balanced a heavy textbook on her knees and tried not to. Each week Lana reminded us of Perky’s growth based on our crude drawings and ridiculous
comparisons.

  Though a few of Lana’s clients grew more interested in Lana as her breasts and belly took on weight and fluid, many of them came less regularly. But because she’d never announced a father, most of the men still felt obligated to leave small offerings. Gary, head irrigator, brought her a five-gallon bucket of water from the river each morning. Oscar, one of our orchardists, brought jars of ghost fruit jelly. It took him hours to make the jelly; he often did so in the Center, so he could talk to other Zionites while he stirred endlessly, waiting for the fruit to thicken. He bent over the heat so earnestly, Lana and I often joked that there was as much sweat in the jelly as ghost fruit. Without as many clients to occupy her, Lana spent more time trailing me around the Piles like a small directionless blimp, scolding me for failing to collect baby objects. Two hours after her thirty-two-week checkup, she’d pointedly held up a tiny silver spoon and a green sun hat with frog eyes stitched to the top.

  “How can you be missing these things?” she asked, propping the hat coyly on her head.

  “My job is not to procure baby items for you, Lana. There’s a whole encampment here, you know.”

  “Meow.”

  “Yes,” I said tiredly, “meow.” I hefted some panels of linoleum into the buggy.

  “I could put these in the corner of my room,” she said, fingering a corner. “A nursery.”

  “I was thinking the Clinic. Easy cleanup.”

  She took the hat off. “I’m just trying to make the best of this, Mira. Why are you being so bitchy all of a sudden?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I took the hat from her and put it on my head. “I just really wanted the hat for myself.” Lana snorted.

  Asher and Rodney walked by, carrying a screen door between them. Asher whistled appreciatively. “Hot,” said Rodney. He smiled. Sparkler tips in my gut.

  When I turned back to Lana she was watching me watch him. She pushed the hat off my head. “It’s been crap. We act sometimes like the world wasn’t lifted away. The world was lifted away.”

  “I know.”

  “Sometimes you act like you don’t know. You act like you’ve been pushing a buggy around fucking Piles your whole life. Like you’re not angry.”

  “I’m not angry.”

  “You are angry.”

  “At who?”

  “At no one. Everyone. Me. This. Our fucking purgatory in the cloudy armpit of the Midwest. Where I take off my clothes every day for men who close their eyes and whisper the names of dead women into my ear. Where you can’t seem to take off a fucking sock for a guy you’ve liked for three years. What’s wrong with you?”

  “It’s complicated, Lana.” I tried to say it kindly. I tried to say it in the kind of tone that would make her understand.

  “Of course it’s complicated. We’re fighting over six squares of puke-colored linoleum.” She picked a tile out of the buggy and tried to throw it angrily. It landed with a contented puff of dust two feet away from her. She tried again with a piece of rebar but she couldn’t lift it out of the buggy.

  I started to laugh. I sat down on the dusty ground and put the frog hat in front of my face and laughed. Lana was beside me then, laughing too. When we were done I put the hat in front of her nose. “It smells like baby,” I said.

  She inhaled. Nodded. We passed it back and forth for a while like a joint, not saying anything.

  “You can’t say fuck all the time after the baby’s born.”

  “I know,” she said. She inhaled again.

  I pressed together and pulled apart the tiny Velcro tabs on the ends of the hat strings.

  “I love him,” I said finally.

  “I know,” she said.

  Him was Rodney, of course. To say I loved him was an easy thing, a plain truth. But as my father had said repeatedly, from the pulpit and from the couch, love is a verb. The love I had now was a feeling, nothing more. A feeling that could come or go, that I could sweep away or ignore; it didn’t mean much. When love became a verb, that’s when you got into trouble. Then you started depending on someone, not in the way I already depended on everyone in Zion to shovel out shit or cook turnips or collect ghost fruit or extract possum carcasses from barbed-wire snares. Love with Rodney would mean he’d become my own big fat personal emotional crutch. Not even a crutch. One of those scooters on which someone could prop up a broken leg. And then, when he left or something went wrong as it always did, I’d be left trying to hop around like an idiot. I’d be immobile, emotionally immobile. Ever since the Rending I could see that emotionally immobile woman on a hill off in the distance, a version of myself who was incapable, who wallowed grayly, functionally dim. I knew she existed, this other version up on the hill.

  My mom had a version of herself like that. Her curds-and-whey self. That version would come to visit for months at a time. Mom would still fold the laundry and set dishes down with little clinks, but every movement was like she was doing it in a pond of glue. Mostly I remember her face, lit by the computer screen. She’d nestle on the couch with a glass of wine and shop online, often for one of the vases she collected but sometimes for shoes or an immersion blender, car floor mats or coffee filters. If I was quiet and sweet she’d let me slip in next to her—she still smelled the same, like peppermint and sweet Hawaiian bread—and we’d watch the images float up the screen. Sometimes she’d read a review quietly, under her breath. Occasionally she’d ask my opinion and I’d always try to confirm whatever item she was already leaning toward. Whatever darkness was pressing her into a corner, I didn’t want to add more. I wanted her to feel right and strong.

  My father didn’t do much during these episodes. He seemed more tired because he had to pick up so much slack; he didn’t complain but I don’t think he got her help either. Or maybe he did. Now I know that so much of what happens inside a coupling is invisible to everyone who stands outside it. And my father was so entrenched in dichotomies: death and resurrection, saint and sinner, law and gospel. Both at once, he’d sagely explain from the folds of his alb, always both at once. I think to him my mother’s depression was part of the whole, not something that could be excised or transformed.

  But I was not yet that version of myself in the distance. The one incapable of anything besides slow, gray grief. To love and lose Rodney, though, I knew that was a sure way to invite that woman to come wandering into my life. To open her suitcase and take out her slippers and curling iron, her lotions and silk underwear. If she came wandering down that hill I knew she’d stay.

  I also knew I’d let Rodney down. I would fuck up in some incredible way, a way I couldn’t even comprehend now. Just as on the day of the Rending, I had failed Bim so entirely that I’d lost the chance to ever be near him again.

  Initially your Final Moment, as we called it, was one of the first things you revealed about yourself when you met someone new. The fragile currency of post-Rending conversation. Like where you were on 9/11. Where you were when JFK was shot. As though history were best constructed by piling together the individual experiences of a singular, tragic event. The only members of the encampment who knew each other before the Rending (besides Sylvia and Ida) were Marjorie and Sven. They’d been golfing when the Rending occurred. Sven’s arms had been wrapped around Marjorie, his hands wrapped around her hands, lifting a golf club together, both pairs of eyes on the pocked ball. That’s how they described their Final Moment.

  Ida and Sylvia had been in S’More Outdoor, a camping outfitter in the Mall of America for those who didn’t actually spend all that much time outdoors. The S’More footwear clerks were too busy squatting in front of mothers trying on Tevas and retirees pointing to photos in guidebooks to tend to the twins. Ida finally bent to the floor to press the rubber at the toe of the Bass hiking boot Sylvia was trying on for both of them. “My thumb on Sylvia’s toe.” That’s what Ida would say if you asked her the last thing she remembered before the Rending.

  Hands clasped over hands, thumb against toe: they’d bee
n touching. Marjorie and Sven. Sylvia and Ida. They were touching then, when it happened, and here they were, together, now. The myriad ways I could have been touching Bim sifted through my consciousness constantly. Hugging him as he came through the swinging red gate after the ride ended. Rubbing between his shoulder blades as he vomited bits of cotton candy into a green garbage can chained to the ground. His body falling against mine accidentally as he attempted a particularly complicated freestyle walking maneuver. One of my thigh hairs, pinched between his thumb and index finger and yanked as the coaster crested the top of the hill. Swatting his hand away as he tried to dig in my back pocket for the remaining money from Mom.

  No one else in Zion seemed to have put this coincidence together. Or maybe they had and, like me, they didn’t want to admit the possibility to anyone else. I knew what Lana would say. Or Rodney. Even Chester. That I was being ridiculous and that there had to have been millions of other people touching when the Rending happened and where, exactly, were they? And what good does it do to wonder? To beat yourself up? There’s nothing to be done about it now. While debating the possible causes of the Rending might help us to understand our current predicament, lamenting what we could have done differently then, back in the Before, that was useless.

  But I couldn’t shake my grief or my guilt, couldn’t shake the nagging sense that walking away from my brother to buy a necklace for myself was a “teachable moment,” as my father would have said. A lesson about narcissism and selfishness and impatience. A lesson about What Love Truly Is, the four words my father often slipped into sermons. Or an example in a book I once saw my newly divorced aunt reading: What Love Is: Advice from the Front Lines of Marriage. Love is never going to bed angry. Love is saying yes I will. Love is remembering to put the toilet seat down. I imagined myself in a companion book called What Love Is Not: Advice from the Post-Apocalyptic Future that would begin: love is not abandoning your brother just before the end of the world for an H&M necklace.