The Rending and the Nest

by Kaethe Schwehn

  I loved that Rodney had two sides: the version of himself I saw and the version he showed to the rest of Zion. Others saw him as strong, reserved, abrupt. They trusted him to keep anything we deemed a weapon safe, secure. They admired his knowledge of snares, his ability to skin and disembowel an animal. “I mean, I trust Rodney,” said Talia to me once in the middle of one of her endless monologues, “but I wouldn’t want him mad at me. I think he has a lot of anger. His third chakra is a hot mess. And I just never want to be the one standing in front of him when that anger decides to come rolling out.”

  I didn’t buy into Talia’s chakra bullshit exactly but I understood what she meant; there was always a sense of motion below the surface of Rodney, a sense of him being bound by something, as though the branch on his jaw might come undone from his skin. I didn’t know that most men who appear to be stoic do so purposely because they lack an internal game. Dumb or charmless, soul-stunned or lazy, these men have nevertheless discovered that women will travel upstream like spawning salmon at the hint of a below, an under, a beneath. So they present themselves as a closed door and women spend weeks, months, even years tapping upon it for access, ultimately finding on the other side an eternity of empty space. To find that Rodney possessed room upon room, each filled with artifacts and ideas, memories and landscapes I’d never touched—I didn’t know then how rare that was.

  Here is a truth: After you experience the apocalypse, after you are living on the other side of it, falling in love still feels like its own apocalypse. Even on the other side, you will still use this comparison. And it will not be trite or cliché. Instead, you will know it to be true.

  For the first few weeks after my night with Rodney, I was consumed. I went through the usual motions: I climbed the Piles, I delivered items to Tenzin and Sven and Asher, I washed my climbing shirts and hung them on the nails in my wall, I sent notes to Lana and tiptoed through the Center hoping Talia wouldn’t look up from her book and notice me, I mended socks at community meetings while visitors told their stories and Zionites whined at each other about latrine care and Sorting Station access, I helped with the construction of the visitor quarters, and from time to time I wiped the accumulated dust from Lana’s Baby. But my thoughts were always turning to Rodney. I was a dog and Pavlov’s bell was ringing, ringing, ringing. There were things I should have been worried about: Lana, her Baby, the increase in visitors, our capricious food supply, the possibility of other Babies and what this might mean. But all of this fell away.

  I wanted him. And when I found him alone I fell into him, fell at him. I took him to the top of each Pile and showed him my resting spaces. At the top of Larry I straddled him on a barstool I’d wedged upright between a tire and a huge terra-cotta flowerpot; at the top of Curly he leaned me over a wrought-iron gate, the tips of black iron pressing into the underside of my chin. At the top of Moe I showed him where I’d fastened a crib sheet as a canopy. We didn’t make love there. We just lay on our backs, holding hands, looking at the equidistantly placed clouds hovering on the baby-blue fabric sky.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I didn’t realize how much time had elapsed, or how much my own version of time had been clouded, until the day we watched Deborah bathing in the river. Asher and Tenzin and Rodney were hard at work on the visitor addition so I was on the lookout for weight-bearing framing materials. The ones that proved too heavy or awkward for me to remove on my own I tagged with a scrap of bright fabric so the objects could be collected later when I had the help of another Zionite. Often Rodney was the one who came to help me, which meant that instead we both climbed to the top of Larry and removed our clothes.

  One day, as we passed a pitcher of water back and forth between us and ate handfuls of shriveled ghost fruit, we watched a figure with long hair unhitch herself from the tree line and stand at the edge of the water, unmoving. The river switched its hips back and forth, its color flat and dark without the sun’s reflection. Rodney started to hum “Down to the River to Pray” and I hummed a few bars with him before I caught myself and stopped.

  “Where did you learn that song?” I asked.

  “Who knows,” he said. “Maybe that movie? With the escaped criminals?”

  “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”

  “Yeah.”

  The figure removed her shirt and pulled off her pants. Her hair was darker against the pale streak of her body.

  “So this is why you sit here,” said Rodney.

  “I’ve never seen anyone bathe there before,” I said, gesturing with a piece of ghost fruit toward the bank where the figure stood.

  “Sure you haven’t.” Rodney lifted the tuft of my messy ponytail and kissed my neck.

  “Who is that?”

  He shrugged. “Cassie? I’d be able to guess more accurately if she’d turn around.”

  I pinched his upper thigh and he tried to tweak my right nipple.

  Then she did turn. Just slightly so we could see her enormously pregnant profile. I stopped moving.

  “Deborah,” said Rodney.

  “She’s pregnant.”

  “You knew that.”

  And I did know that. Or I had known that. Right before Lana gave birth, Deborah and Tenzin had rather shyly raised their clasped hands together during a community meeting and announced that Deborah was five months along. But then Lana’s baby was born and I’d spent almost all my time since then either on the Piles or with Rodney. Even in community meetings I barely noted the presence of anyone else. For three months I’d forgotten to look. Forgotten to see anything. The truth felt like a whip end.

  “I need to see if Ida and Sylvia need me to look for anything. For the birth.” I retied the tails of my climbing shirt, bent to knot my Keds.

  Rodney grabbed one of the tail ends. “Mira, it’s OK. You don’t have to rush off. She’s not in labor now.”

  I pulled my shirt out of his grasp and started down the face of Larry, tracing a path I knew Rodney couldn’t follow.

  I knew rationally that I had no right to be angry with Rodney, but I was. He’d sealed himself over my eyes like a permanent pair of rose-colored glasses, strung me out on a kind of partial oblivion. I felt suddenly claustrophobic, Jonah in the belly of the whale.

  When I arrived at the Clinic I was out of breath. In the waiting area, Ida sat on one of the blue plastic stadium seats, cutting fabric into strips. In the back, Sylvia lifted a pair of scissors out of a steaming pot.

  “I’m here to help,” I said. “What do you need? For Deborah?”

  “You look a little flushed,” said Ida, raising one eyebrow and smiling.

  Sylvia came out of the exam room, drying her hands on a towel. “How’s the view from the top of Larry?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Ha ha,” I said. That they both knew about Rodney and me, that our romance hadn’t been a secret, that my obsession was not buried nearly as deep as I thought—this made me feel like vomiting.

  “It’s OK, Mir,” said Ida, her voice softening. “We’re glad you’re happy.”

  “Deborah,” I said.

  “There’s nothing we can do now,” said Sylvia, matter-of-fact again. “We’ll let you know if we need anything.”

  “We’ll put you on call when she’s in labor,” said Ida. “Could be anytime.” Then she bent her head and, began to roll a strip of checkered fabric around the blue straw Lana had used during her labor, when I’d thought of Bim on the roller coaster, imagined his body slipping through the slim sapphire passages.

  I crossed the quadrangle without looking for Rodney, without trying to take note of his presence. Cal and Cassie were hauling a load of ghost fruit to the Center. The red bandana fluttered beside Lana’s closed door. Two visitors—a couple—had their belongings laid out in front of the visitor quarters and seemed to be debating the efficacy of various packing techniques. Chester barely looked up from his book when I entered his room and dropped into a sling-back chair I’d never seen before. The glass eye in his bowl of treasures on the cof
fee table gazed unflinchingly. Beside the bowl was a row of rolled fortunes and a plastic bottle cap filled with a gray liquid. How long had it been since I’d sat here with Chester? Since I’d tried to match my breath to the creaking of his rocker? Since I’d unwrapped a fortune? Days? Weeks? Months?

  He was rocking slightly, book open on his lap. I recited, staring at his bowl of strange treasures, the poem I’d remembered when I kissed Rodney on our first morning together:

  There is a gold light in certain old paintings

  That represents a diffusion of sunlight.

  It is like happiness, when we are happy.

  It comes from everywhere and nowhere at once, this light.

  When I finished, Chester asked me to recite it again so I did.

  “It’s a nice poem,” he said, holding the page of a book taut with one hand as he drew his razor blade around the chosen words.

  “I used to think it was such an upbeat poem, when I was in high school. All that light and happiness.”

  “Sounds upbeat to me.”

  “Maybe. Maybe it’s just thinking about it now. Certain old paintings, not all of them. And the sunlight diffused. Not we are happy but when we are happy. As though happiness is something that just happens occasionally.”

  “Isn’t it?” He rolled the rectangle of paper he’d cut into a tiny tube, then dropped the tip of his index finger into the bottle cap on the table. Likely a mixture from Zephyr. Chester slid his finger along the edge of the paper. Sealed it carefully.

  “Light coming from nowhere. I thought that was such a poetic idea. I remember saying the line over and over again, ‘everywhere and nowhere at once, this light,’ while my grandma was dying.”

  Chester nodded as if I’d told him this before. He set the rolled fortune on the table.

  “Which sounds romantic, right? Poetry at your dying grandmother’s bedside? But it wasn’t. I didn’t want to be there but my parents wanted someone there, at all times, the ‘death watch’ they started to call it. So I rode the city bus after school and did my homework on the little side table in her room, which was usually OK. Except when I had to memorize that poem. I don’t even know why I’m telling you this.”

  Chester shrugged without looking up at me. Pulled the blade across another expanse of paper.

  “All the monitors were beeping. There was the shush of a million carts being rolled everywhere. And this old black-and-white film crackling on her television, men in shades of gray stealing a painting. I was trying to concentrate and it was so loud: the rickety dialogue, someone tumbling down a set of stairs, gunshots. I turned it off. My grandmother’s nurse had made a big deal of telling me not to but I did anyway. And that’s the one time my grandma started to move, to thrash as much as someone with three ounces of life left inside can thrash, the tubes in her mouth making her look hooked, caught. Like she should be clubbed to death so she wouldn’t be in pain.”

  Chester raised his eyebrows.

  “Yep, that’s what I thought about my grandmother. That she was a trout that should just be put out of her misery. Anyway, the nurse came bustling in. Looked at me with her ‘shame-on-you’ face, turned on the television, settled my grandmother down. She died a couple days later.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Chester.

  “Whatever. The point is that in spite of having that memory attached to the poem I’ve always loved it.”

  “Everywhere and nowhere at once.”

  I nodded. It was a nice thing to visualize in the Before, when light was light and the sun was a marvelous ball that whipped up shadows and glare. “Back then those paintings felt close, like you could go and find one and stand with your hands behind your back and bask in that golden light all day if you wanted.”

  Chester shrugged. “You don’t know for sure you won’t find one.”

  But I knew. I hadn’t found art. Not real art. Hadn’t found Shakespeare or Donne or Dickinson, hadn’t found the Bible or the Koran or the Mahabharata. We’d been given back our cow-patterned sheets and light fixtures, our linoleum and socket wrenches, our books with straight lines of fact and obtuse theories, our magazines filled with train layouts and thirty-minute meals, but the certain old paintings and with them their gold light—those were gone. Even the words I’d memorized seemed fragile. As I pushed Chester’s bead curtain aside I wondered if I’d had the poem right or if I’d mangled phrases, switched the syntax, let whole lines sink into a firmament where they could never be recovered.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Deborah gave birth to three birds. Marjorie was the one to tell me. I was coming back from latrine duty, trying to keep my hands an ample distance from my body until I could get to the river to wash. Marjorie was standing at the edge of the orchard with her gathering basket in one hand, her gray hair floating, rising and falling around her in the wind. She wasn’t calling or gesturing but I knew to go to her. We sat on an old air-conditioning unit the orchardists used for storage.

  Marjorie took my hand and stroked it while she told me, running the tip of her index finger down the length of each of my fingers, rubbing each nail lightly. They weren’t real birds, she explained, they were decorative, the kind you could attach to the boughs of your Christmas tree or your porch railing. There were little bendy wires on the feet of the birds. That was the phrase she used, “little bendy wires,” and they had hurt Deborah a little coming out. But she was going to be OK.

  “What are they?”

  “What are what, sweetheart?”

  “The birds. What kind are they?”

  Marjorie looked at me a little strangely. Her eyes were blue but the left had a strange brown spot on the iris. “Well, I think there was a cardinal and a goldfinch. I think. Maybe a sparrow was the third? Maybe a thrush. Something red, something yellow, something brown.”

  “Are they clean?” I couldn’t think of Deborah. Couldn’t even bring myself to think of her face. But the idea that the birds might be covered in blood or afterbirth made me want to heave.

  “I think Ida’s taking care of that.”

  “OK,” I said. “Does Lana know?”

  Marjorie nodded. If she said anything after that I don’t remember. I remember telling her I was fine, over and over again, so that she’d walk away.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  After two days of recuperation in her own room, Deborah staked out space in the Center. For the first few days, she talked with Talia over cup after cup of tea, the three birds lined up on the table in front of her, none of them larger than the teacup Talia offered her, white china with Dutch girls and cows scrolled around the outside in blue. By the fourth day Deborah started to attach the birds to herself. Depending on the hour, the perch for each bird alternated: the bun on top of her head, her scarf, the collar of her shirt. She wore fleece pants and a thick wool sweater to better support the birds’ bendy wires. Chummy, Laverne, and Oxtail was what she named them officially but dear, sweetheart, and honey is what she called them.

  Anyone who passed through the Center, to get fire for a lantern, to grab a sweet potato or cup of tea, to rest momentarily or browse the library, was introduced to Chummy, Laverne, and Oxtail, was encouraged to stroke delicately from the tops of their heads to their backs, to comment on the softness of the feather, the brightness of the eye. After a week, Deborah was bending her head, birdlike, to listen to what Chummy and Laverne and Oxtail had to say, interpreting and translating for the rest of us, making their desires known. Chummy didn’t like loud noises. Laverne liked it if you held your steaming tea just below her beak. Oxtail had a penchant for bright colors and patterns. Meanwhile Tenzin, after having been a dutiful partner for the first few days after the birth, drifted back to work when it became clear that Deborah was stuck in some kind of strange emotional holding pattern.

  Rodney and I went together one day, to be formally introduced to the birds, to marvel at them. I’d been avoiding Rodney mostly, feeling as though this wouldn’t have happened to Deborah if I’d been paying better at
tention to the world instead of just to him, even though rationally I knew that made no sense. But I didn’t want to be introduced to the birds alone. As we entered the Center a wrinkled female visitor towing a yellow plastic sled piled high with her belongings gave a low whistle. She took a big handful of her short gray hair and motioned her head in the direction of the table where Deborah sat. “Woman in there? With those birdies? Nutso.”

  Rodney glanced at her duct-taped shirt cuffs, at the old Quaker oatmeal bin in the sled overflowing with what looked like soiled women’s underwear, at her widened eyes. “Thank you for the heads-up, ma’am,” he said.

  “And thank you for the tails,” she whispered furtively, nodding toward a ball of fur on the sled.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Tails?” I said as we walked away.

  “She saw me skinning those raccoons. She asked.” Rodney shrugged.

  We sat across the table from Deborah. Her face had lost its saggy, misshapen quality. Instead, the edges of her lips looked like they’d been permanently staked to her cheekbones and tiny red cuts and scratches stippled her skin. She took Rodney’s hand in her own, smoothed his index finger over the tiny head of Chummy to show him how to be gentle. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, Rodney, it’s just knowing your own strength and all. You understand.” She nodded and we nodded back at her. Ida had done a good job washing the birds; their feathers were slick, almost iridescent, and each dark eye sparked with a bit of reflected light. Stroking the breast feathers with my thumb felt comforting at first; it had been almost four years since I’d touched an animal gently.

  Then Deborah was up and before I could resist she was attaching Laverne to the fluorescent string that held my notebook. Attached to such a flimsy resting place, the bird flipped upside down, dangling. Unfazed, Deborah returned to her seat and began winding Oxtail’s wires into her sweater. When she was done she held Chummy up to Rodney’s face, to the branch. At the ends of the wires, which were almost entirely coated with green plastic, the silver tips protruded, and these Deborah pressed gently against Rodney’s skin. “Chummy could sit right here,” she said.