CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Lana stood in front of the Nest for a long time, hands dangling at her sides. Her breath came slow and even. The doll, her Baby, lay nestled in the fabric at the bottom. Without turning her head to look at me she said, “I know she’s not alive, Mir. I get it. I know that. But she looks happy there. Do you think I’m batshit crazy if I say that I think she’s happy there?”
“I don’t think you sound bat-shit crazy.”
“She does look kind of cold.”
I nodded. Then she said, “You should make one for Deborah too.”
By the next community meeting I’d made a Nest for the birds as well. I twisted twine and metal coat hangers into a kind of birdcage. I affixed the cage to a silver hubcap but didn’t add any sort of lid or cover; inside the cage I placed the yellow skeleton of an old Connect Four game and around and through and into these holes I wound the bendy wires attached to the feet of Chummy and Laverne and Oxtail. Upright, they looked wry and alert, alive.
The meeting didn’t start on time because everyone wanted to get a closer look at the Nests, and strangely everyone—not just Lana—seemed more at ease, more content in the presence of the Babies now that they were placed, contained, resting. Over her Baby, ostensibly so that she looked less cold, Lana had placed the red bandana that had hung above her door for the last three and a half years. I watched Gary and Oscar and even Zephyr look at it and look at her, as though her gaze might suggest that she was still available, that her use of the bandana was simply a coincidence; but she refused to look.
Paloma, the meeting leader, finally got everyone to sit down by clearing her throat multiple times. Though her figure was soft and feminine (full bosom, wide hips, a ponytail tied at the base of her neck that gave way to a cascade of straight black hair down the entire length of her spine), her voice was gruff and her gait masculine (she led with her shoulders, raised and tight, her pelvis pressed backward). Her family, originally from Guatemala, had raised free-range chickens in the Before to sell to hormone- and pesticide-conscious upper-middle-class families in Minneapolis. They sold the eggs to local co-ops and she’d had one in her hand at the moment of the Rending. She described how one minute there was an egg and the next moment her hand was “full of yellow, full of yolk.” She often did this when she talked, initially forgetting an English word and substituting a description instead, then remembering, correcting.
“We’ll go backward today,” she said. “Issues first. Announcements last. We need to talk about these.” She gestured to the Babies in front of her. “What’s going on here? No one would say what they thought the last time.”
Though the theories began tentatively enough (no one wanted to offend Lana or frighten Cassie), they quickly accrued and gathered a strange and twisting momentum: we were being punished by a supernatural being; we were lab rats below an invisible dome; it was some sort of side effect of the ghost fruit (like Adam and Eve!); a particular trigger or gene had been removed and the women were like the buildings we’d seen on our way to Zion, parts missing and absent, deformed in a way that was impossible to see or define. Talia suggested that the Babies were somehow the manifestation of inner fears and Zephyr suggested, as he often did during Issues time, that maybe this was all just a dream.
Finally Paloma cleared her throat a few more times and said, “Enough. Rules now.”
Lana’s hand rose quietly, an unlit wick. The crown of hair made her look less whimsical, more mature. Paloma nodded at her.
“I propose three rules,” said Lana.
The room grew quiet. “First, I think you—I think we—have to take the Baby—or the Babies—away from the mother within twenty-four hours. If the Baby is like this I mean,” she said, gesturing to the Nests. “Otherwise it’s dangerous. Something in you wants to take care of it, of them, and you can’t. But the second rule is that they should each be given one of these, one of these Nests so that they have a place to go. So the mother—or the father,” she looked at Tenzin, “knows that the Baby is safe.”
“The third rule?” asked Paloma.
“A name. I think each Baby should be given a name. I think that should be Chester’s job.”
A look of surprise crossed Chester’s face. But he looked at Lana and nodded.
There were no exceptions to the Rules, no addendums. All of us were glad to push a little order toward the chaos. We held the first Naming Ceremony, for Lana’s and Deborah’s Babies, at the next community meeting. Asher, Rodney, and Tenzin began construction on the Nesting Facility soon after that.
As much as I hated to admit it, given the distance I felt from both God and Christianity, the Nesting Facility was necessary not only as a physical space to hold the Babies, but as a place we could call holy, where the air particles could shift slightly, where spirits and questions could hover. After Deborah, we realized that things beyond our explanation, if not named and given a place to live, could harm us, could drive us to enter an unspeakable place too.
Lana helped build the Nesting Facility. She was so thin and wiry it never occurred to me she’d be able to lift anything. But she was strong. Her sweatshirt lying in a gray pool on the ground, Lana worked in a white wifebeater, which on our first Valentine’s Day she’d decorated with a red-nail-polish heart. The muscles in her biceps were quail eggs, shifting below her skin as she lifted. The best part of fifty-five-degree weather is that it’s conducive to working long hours—and we did. Rodney and Asher and Tenzin did much of the work but other community members stepped in to help when they could: Paloma and Zephyr and Marjorie and Sven and Kristen and Chester and Oscar and Cassie and Eleanor. There was an odd sense of cheer in the air as we worked, as though we were at an Amish barn raising or filming a Folgers commercial. Asher complimented our efforts without a trace of irony, Tenzin whistled tunes he invented that reminded me of gliders catching updrafts higher and higher, spiraling into the air. Occasionally Lana, who had spent ten days on the cheerleading squad in high school, would shout out an appropriately mangled cheer. Mostly, I think all of us were glad to be doing something tangible in response to the unseen, the unknown.
We built the facility in the middle of the quadrangle, a central, circular room from which three rectangular rooms extended, like a Mercedes symbol. One branch pointed toward the Clinic, the other two pointed toward the spaces between where the Center ended and our rows of rooms began. The rectangular rooms we lined with shelves to hold the Nests; the central room would be used for the Naming Ceremonies or as a place to sit. “Quiet contemplation” were the words Talia used, though I’m not sure anyone had quietly contemplated anything within a twenty-foot radius of Talia.
We still needed a pedestal to hold the Nest in question during the ceremony but none of the objects I’d brought forth to serve that purpose had pleased Lana. Instead she decided we needed to build the pedestal ourselves out of forlorn objects from the Sorting Stations. She declared this would be artistic but so far it just looked ugly.
“I’m trying on gratitude today,” said Lana as she attempted to adhere an answering machine to the preliminary base of the pedestal.
“That sounds promising,” I said, slathering a Zephyr mixture into the cracks between the answering machine and what looked like the former base of a streetlight.
“Maybe not gratitude exactly. I’ve just had a lot of time to think lately.” She pulled her hands gently away from the pedestal. The objects didn’t move. “I’m trying to be positive. What if Zephyr and the others are right? What if the Babies are a kind of sign or signal or opportunity or something?” She stood, brushed the dust off her cheetah-patterned lounge pants, and gave me a crooked smile. “What if they represent a kind of, I don’t know, potential?”
“Potential?” I said, perhaps a little too cynically. I wedged the grill from a barbecue below a splintered trough to give it more support.
The edge of her smile fell. She nudged the answering machine gently. It held. “Forget it,” she said.
“I’
m sorry,” I said. “Say more.” But she was already walking away with the empty mixture bucket while I remained at the base of the pedestal, holding the grill, waiting for what held it to harden.
Later I added the word potential to the list at the front of my notebook, as if it were an object I could find in the Piles, as real under my fingers as fishing line or a Rubik’s Cube or a string of pearls. I hadn’t thought of our bodies, of the Babies that way. I’d only thought of our wombs as damaged, maligned, wrecked. Like the buildings we saw in the Cities, stripped of shutters or gutters or bricks, I’d assumed something crucial had been taken from us—a genetic sequence, an army of white blood cells, the favor of a higher power. I carried the word potential in my head as well as between the sea-blue lines of my notebook, chewing the notion that the Babies weren’t a botched version of a human but were their own kind of cog in a machine we had yet to understand.
Unlike the extra visitor quarters, a fairly simple construction that had taken four months to complete, the Nesting Facility took only a month. By the time Cassie gave birth to a honey bear filled with sand, we had a place to put its Nest and a way to welcome it into the world.
It seems absurd, in retrospect, that after the birth of the first few Babies, we didn’t stop having sex. Why didn’t we make a rule, simple as where to shit or where to dispose of your half-eaten potato, that said, in less vulgar language, Things Get Weird When We Fuck So No More Fucking?
The answer is relatively simple: We were living in the backwash of the former world. Although we found—were blessed to find, Talia often said—objects in the Piles, we were without a great deal too. We missed ice and Netflix and aspirin, tampons and coffee and soap that sudsed into a mountain of lather between our palms. We missed things we never thought we’d miss from the old world: car alarms, the scent of Indian food woven into the fabric of our clothes, the lurch and hiss of the city bus, grapes, granola, Christmas carolers, the fuzzed roar of a packed stadium. We missed the way newscasters spoke into their microphones, the sound of a particular footstep on wooden stairs. We missed stairs.
And we had no mothers or fathers. I had no Bim. And so, almost four years after the Rending, although we had created a fairly stable world in which to live, we still sometimes walked around for weeks at a time looking as though our eyes had been scooped out with spoons, sockets brown and purple with sadness or insomnia.
The sky was gray, yes, but this phenomenon was more than a weather pattern. Those of us that had started with white skin turned almost translucent. Those that had darker skin seemed to lose pigment, an ashy deep-green color rising up below. Depression stopped being a cause for concern and became the status quo; the steady ebb and flow of our loss, the gulping cavernous depths of it, went on and on. The story lies in who we were in spite of all of that. The beautiful veins on Rodney’s hand, the raised life tracking above the skin.
But the unrelenting ache of loss is what made sex necessary. A small moment of pleasure coupled to a draft of oblivion was the closest heaven we could hope for. Pleasure and oblivion and, in my case (and likely the case of other women in Zion), the hope that my body might be different, that my body might be the one that would behave correctly, sprouting a twining umbilicus to feed fingers and toes and liver and kidneys and heart.
Sex wasn’t the only way to find pleasure or oblivion in Zion, of course. A few people cut themselves. Gary and Kristen and Oscar ran the road, loop after loop, until a passable version of bliss swept their faces. Marjorie and Sven sometimes came to community meetings with soft smiles and bleary eyes, prompting rumors that they’d found a way to ferment the ghost fruit. And once Tenzin had explained to us, eyes lit, how he and Rodney had found a buck (the meat of which we were currently eating) tangled in the barbed wire of a fence; how they’d had to heave rocks to stun it, how he’d sliced the jugular and literally seen the life drain out of the eyes. Deborah had set down her plate then and walked from the room. Tenzin hadn’t ever spoken of what happened on their hunting trips again and I rarely asked Rodney for details. If butchering animals brought him pleasure, I didn’t want to know.
There was much we could regulate in Zion, but no one was willing to suggest that we remove whatever small sources of pleasure might be left to us, even when it became clear that the result of those couplings had the potential to cause all of us harm.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
This is what is important to know about the next year, the fifth year:
There were four births and seven new Babies. In addition to Cassie’s Baby, Esther, there were three sets of twins. Paloma gave birth to a set of ivory chopsticks, Nairobi and Phoenix; five months later, Eleanor birthed a set of salt and pepper shakers that Chester christened Azure and Tallow. Kristen’s twins weren’t identical. Homer, a curling cable bike lock, came easily but it took Sylvia a long time to coax Ezra, four skateboard wheels on a chain, from Kristen’s womb. Each Nest was different: Nairobi’s built in a single night, a stack of newspapers crinkled and bunched and bound with strips of green cloth from a May Day banner; Tallow’s created over the course of a week, a wooden bowl I left in the Center so Zionites could add candle drippings to it, the wax thickening into time-stopped tears. The Naming Ceremonies were awkward at first, but by the time Ezra and Homer were born a pattern was in place.
We came after the community meeting, our lanterns dotting the dark quadrangle like salt scattered on black ice. We entered the Nesting Facility humming. Sometimes a tune, sometimes simply the note that was buzzing inside us. Sometimes our note attached to others when we entered and our hum became a low drone and other times a melody formed, something from the Before or something we invented in the now, between us. Some of us held hands. The Baby rested in the Nest at the top of the pedestal Lana and I had made. Then there was usually some sort of breaking—a breaking of the weight, of the heavy importance of the moment. Someone would walk in late, someone would cough or fart or belch, Chester would make too much noise uncrinkling the paper he’d brought, or a sound in the distance would remind us that someone hadn’t come to the ceremony and we’d exchange smirks or eye rolls. The mother and father, standing near the Nest, would visibly relax at that point.
And then Chester would hand the paper to Ida and Ida in her homey voice would say, “Here’s what Chester thinks we should call this Baby.” And then she’d read the name and the mother and father would nod. Or sometimes laugh. Then the mother or father sang a lullaby or asked us to sing a lullaby. We did “Rock-a-bye Baby” and “Hush Little Baby” and other less likely numbers like “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Usually someone cried. A few left as soon as the lullaby was finished. Many went to the Baby and touched it and said the name. I suppose I should have thought of baptisms in those moments but instead I thought of the tiny stone frog on the doorstep of our neighbor, Mrs. Parker. It sat on its haunches, rubbery lips pulled into a permanent smile, and waved at passersby. I high-fived it on my way to school each day, the tip of my index finger pressed to the center of its palm. I did it for luck most of the time but I think also for the tiny possibility that there was a bit of life buzzing underneath there, a bit of spirit that might charge out through my skin. We touched the Babies to honor the mother and father and in the hope that we might sense something there, coursing below the surface of plastic or ivory or leather. After everyone was gone, Lana placed the Nest on a shelf, straightened the cushions that faced the shelves, and wiped the top of the pedestal with her sleeve. She was mistress of this place now, rather than playing mistress to anyone else. It suited her.
Rodney and I fell back into one another but this time I knew to come up for air. Lana and I edged toward one another, slowly at first, but gradually things between us felt comfortable again. For a long time after the birth of her Baby, Lana was so fragile that it would have been impossible for me to ask her to hold any burden of mine. Any complaint I had felt small, dust at the foot of her Kilimanjaro. So I kept my mouth shut. Bu
t then one day Lana found me in the Center, fastening and unfastening the magnets to the Zion refrigerator map, and she asked what was wrong and I told her it was Bim’s birthday. He would have been fourteen. I told her I felt like I should be able to imagine what he’d look like now, that it was my job to grow him up in my imagination at least. I made him taller, broader, gave him bigger feet and boxers instead of tighty-whiteys—but his face always remained the same. The head of a ten-year-old on the body of a fourteen-year-old. “I feel like I fail him all the time,” I said. “Even now.”
She didn’t placate me or tell me it would be OK. She took me to the Nesting Facility and made me sit on a pillow and all afternoon she did gentle things, painting my nails with the Sharpie, brushing my hair, massaging my hands, all the while asking me questions about Bim. What game did he like to play and how did he walk and who cut his hair and what was in his room? And she let me talk and talk until he came back a little, until I was able to bring a version of him into the room long enough to wish him well.
There were more visitors the fifth year. They had heard about the extra spaces in our visitor quarters, I suppose, and many of them wanted to stay longer than the week allotted them.
Zion lay between Highway 77 and Interstate 35, two thruways that ran south from Minneapolis–St. Paul—or what had been Minneapolis–St. Paul. Most of the visitors used I-35; savvy entrepreneurs had set up hostel-type facilities at fairly regular intervals along the blacktop. Because the only weather the post-Rending world boasted was gray skies, mild temperatures, and a wet saturation of the ground every couple days, structures didn’t need to be particularly stable to be functional.
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