But Zion wasn’t a way station. We were an encampment built, as I have said, near the bones of an actual town. We were two miles away from 35 and one mile from 77, so the visitors we received weren’t the standard travelers. They were those who needed substantial rest or medical care; or they came to see our version of life lived after the Rending.
Some visitors kept to themselves. Others sat in the Center for hours, drinking ghost fruit tea and half-heartedly working on a jigsaw puzzle (on a day when I was feeling particularly unpleased with the world I’d combined an incomplete puzzle of kittens with one of a castle in Scotland). All of the visitors washed in the river and all visited the Clinic at some point. Sylvia and Ida treated blisters and cuts, sprains and exposure. Many of the visitors wandered around Zion and, finding the place where Rodney or Asher was working, would stand, twenty feet away, watching. Eventually, Rodney would approach the visitor with a hammer or an axe, a croquet mallet or a length of rebar, and say, “Here, lend a hand.” The visitor would pitch in then or wander far enough away not to be distracting.
We gave them food and shelter for a week. The return currency was story. In previous years we’d pestered visitors for information, for news from elsewhere, but now that there was a steady stream of strangers we made the process official. Our Friday-night entertainment. Most Zionites showed up to listen although, unfortunately, most of the visitors weren’t natural storytellers. Almost all were men who by choice hadn’t found a home after the Rending. They were loners, the type of men who, in the Before, would have stretched their cash indefinitely on beaches in Thailand or lingered in coffee shops with a copy of Kerouac on the table in front of them and a dog tied to the bike rack outside. They weren’t generally elegant about speaking and they didn’t think in terms of narrative or climax or character. Information had to be pried out of them and they spoke in spurts, as though used to spitting out wads of tobacco in between phrases. So this was how we heard the news. In scraps, in bits, in bullet points:
“Decent people don’t live in the Cities.”
“Sure, there’s regular folks in the Cities, but they keep to themselves.”
“You’d think people would hole up in million-dollar lofts or Victorian mansions but they don’t for the most part. People get creeped out pretty easily, living in those spaces.”
“Women stay in. Women cover up. Women travel in groups.”
“I haven’t seen a gun but that doesn’t mean there aren’t guns out there. The question is who has the guns. Where are the guns being kept? Are the guns in the Piles? There are knives though. I’ve seen more knives in the last four years than I saw in my forty years in the Before. I’ve got a buddy who makes sheaths for knives. Nice ones attached to belts. People will trade him a can of expired tuna for a sheath. Can you believe that shit?”
“You’ve got some nice Piles here. A lot to use. I’ve seen Piles that are just junk. Nothing worth looking at.”
“I haven’t seen anyone killed but I’ve seen people who look like they want to kill. And I’ve seen a lot more people who look like they wanna die.”
“The Zoo. I was there a year ago. Real fucked-up setup there. There was a man with a suit, real clean. Nice enough but kind of strange. When I talked to him his voice had this way of swinging back and forth, couldn’t even really tell you what he said.”
“People kill for food, mostly. Not always the people you’d expect. I don’t wanna say more.”
“In the south they use the stadiums for trade. People bring all sorts of things. What they’ve scavenged. What they’ve found in the Piles.”
“Is there a better place? Depends on what you’re looking for I suppose. The amusement parks. Six Flags and whatnot? Those places are fucked up. Stuffed animals hanging from the top of those game tents? Looked like some movie right before the zombies come out and tear you up. I got out of there real fast. This is pretty good. What you have going here.”
By the fifth year we knew what to listen for, because we were interested in what we didn’t hear. No widespread disease. We heard: death by knife, by rope, by falling, by drowning, by asphyxiation, by choking, by board with nails still protruding. Death by human hand—hand of the self or hand of the other. But no death by bacteria, by germ, by virus, by cancer. No slow pain sprouting on the inside that couldn’t be quelled. Sometimes I wondered if our new world was an arena and this was a version of gladiators. If you take away 95 percent of the world, will the pain kill off the other 5 percent? Will they kill each other out of fear and loneliness?
The visitors came and we listened. The visitors went away and we went on with our lives. Until Michael arrived, at least. The fifth year ended on the day that Michael arrived.
PART TWO
CHAPTER ONE
Lana entered breathless. Rarely since the birth of her Baby had Lana been breathless because rarely did she feel like moving at a pace that required her heart to step up its motion. I was sitting on the floor of my room, fastening metal odds and ends to the rim of a Nest for Paloma’s next Baby, though she wasn’t due for another four or five months.
“Who do you think the father is?” I asked Chester, who’d been offering me unwanted construction advice.
Chester started to hum “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” around the mouthpiece of his pipe. I rolled my eyes. “Nice, Chester.”
“What’s nice?” asked Lana as she breezed through the doorway and, without waiting for a response from me, did some sort of ballet combination through the detritus on the floor, at one point using my head for balance and at another swooping her toe in a rainbow over Chester’s head. Then she collapsed on the couch, panting gently.
“Your enthusiasm seems to be greater than ours,” I said drily. “What’s up?”
Lana sighed, closed her eyes and let one arm dangle over the side of the couch as though she were boating in a Manet painting.
“Well?” I said.
She opened her eyes and turned on her side, using both hands to pillow her head so she looked very much like a seventh-grader at a sleepover. “Well?” I said again.
“He. Is. Here.”
“Who? Jesus? Have you had a conversion experience?” I was only half kidding. Her eyes were darting everywhere, lighting on an object and then lifting off again, as though looking at something for too long burned her retinas.
“Jesus?” She batted my question away with a hand. “Not Jesus. Michael.”
“Michael?” I felt like we were playing “Who’s on First?” Chester had gone back to flipping through a National Geographic, theoretically looking for fortunes or Baby names or both.
“Just listen.”
“Okay. I’m listening.”
“I went into the Center because I needed to light my lantern” (she gestured to the Mason jar she’d left near the door) “and when I walked in there was this guy, this visitor, by the fire. Talia was stroking his arm, of course. And he was beautiful, Mir, he is beautiful I mean, he’s tall—so tall—but not scrawny tall. Rodney tall but without all the brawniness. No offense. You know I love Rodney. But Michael has these perfect proportions and all this dark wavy hair that actually looks clean. I was looking at him from the side, first, and his nose—my God, I’ve never noticed anyone’s nose before but his was perfect. Can you believe I’m saying this, that I’m talking about a guy’s nose?”
“No?” I said, trying to be helpful.
“I was honestly thinking they could put his face on Sesame Street.”
“That doesn’t seem like a very high compliment,” muttered Chester without looking up.
“I wasn’t finished, Chester. I mean, do you remember, when they’d show a scene like a park or a row of buildings or a street sign and then a voice would ask you to find a shape? Octagon? Rectangle? Whatever. OK, so his nose was—is—a perfect isosceles triangle!” Lana paused as though she’d come to a punch line.
“Wow,” I said rather feebly. “Did you talk to him?”
“Of course I talked to him. I’
m just trying to give you a sense of—well, whatever, forget it. I guess you’ll meet him soon enough.”
“I’m glad you’re excited.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“Seriously, Lana. It’s good to see you happy.”
“You don’t even understand what made me happy yet. Well, you kind of do. The point is that he saw me and our eyes met and then he lit my candle for me—” Chester covered his hand with his mouth to stifle a laugh. “What? Chester, what?” Chester just shook his head but I made the mistake of making eye contact with him and had to cover my mouth too. Lana closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see either of us. She lifted her chin and told the rest of the story like a martyr about to be executed: “So then he lit my candle and he told me his name and I told him my name. And he said, ‘It’s so very nice to meet you, Lana.’ Then we stared at each other until Talia cleared her throat and asked if we wanted tea.” Lana lowered her chin and opened her eyes. Chester and I had gotten hold of ourselves but were studiously not looking at one another.
“That sounds really, um, romantic,” I said.
“It’s not even about romance, Mir. I mean it sort of is. He’s beautiful, but the point is that he’s not like any other visitor. He looked so comfortable, like he already belonged. He didn’t seem lost. All the other visitors always seem lost or like they’re looking for something.”
“You could put that on your Match.com profile,” suggested Chester.
“What?”
“That you love Candy Land, turnip pottage, and men who don’t seem lost.”
“Hilarious.”
“Also, men who know how to light a lantern,” I added.
“There was no way to say that without sounding ridiculous,” said Lana. “I tried to think of a way to tell it that wouldn’t sound cliché. But there aren’t a lot of ways to say that he lit my candle …” This time Lana laughed too. She rolled over on her back and laughed until tears came, the wisps of hair loosed from the crown making her face look softer, gentler.
It was good to be this way. The three of us, laughing. Chester’s blue eyes wide and alert, petals of red at the tops of Lana’s cheeks, my own particular purpose here spread out around me on the floor, the glints of metal reflecting back pieces of the room, doubling us in fragments.
CHAPTER TWO
I wish there had been something in Lana’s voice, something in the recounting of the perfection of Michael’s nose or the way he helped relight her lantern, anything to set off a tiny bell of warning. But there was nothing.
And so I left Chester and Lana in my room, left Paloma’s half-finished Nest, and headed to the Piles to do a little more scavenging before it became too dark to see. More and more, Tenzin was assuming the role of scavenger so that I could work on the Nests, but it was hard to communicate to him exactly what was in my brain, the memory of the placement of each object. I’d tried diagrams but mostly I realized he’d just have to figure it out for himself as I had. So Zionites still came to me with requests and I still kept the List around my neck. And then there were the staples, the things we always needed—screws, nails, ball bearings, a flywheel: objects I’d never thought about in the Before that now I dedicated whole days to extracting.
I was on the far side of Moe, peeling back the faux greenery of a Christmas wreath to see if the wiring that bound it was worth salvaging, when I felt Rodney’s arms around me. Breath on my neck. I remember thinking breath on my neck, and how much it sounded like a moment from one of my mother’s recovery novels. I turned to face him.
“Hey,” he said. Two days’ worth of stubble was pushing through the lower half of his face, the branch on his jaw visible but fading.
“Hey,” I said. I was thinking of Lana, and that flush of excitement, her palpable moony desire. It had been a year since I first went to Rodney with that chain of silver daggers clasped around my neck. Already lust had been replaced by the comfort of predictability. Here were his hazel eyes flicked with lashes. Here was the tiny scar above his eyebrow that no one ever noticed because everyone looked at his jaw. Here was his hair, chopped into uneven clumps. Here on my fingers, after touching his hair, was the particular oil of his scalp. Here was his plaid shirt, maroons and blues, and the green wool vest he wore over it because the shirt had lost every button. Here was the stain on his vest from the packet of soy sauce I’d found and brought to him months ago. Here was the invisible place around the stain where I’d tried to suck the taste from his sweater. Here was a sliver of potato peel wedged between his upper incisors. Here the fine fuzz of brown fur that grew along the rim of his ear. Here the shoulders and here the hands, easy on my waist.
Maybe it was feeling that difference, between the fragility of early lust and the secure warmth of now, that made me unbutton my pants and turn my back to him. He lifted the back of my shirt, enough that he could kiss a small “v” of skin while he entered me. For the first time since being with Rodney I closed my eyes and pretended it was someone else fucking me. No one I knew or remembered, no face plucked from a tabloid or a history book, just someone anonymous. Clean.
And then I was pregnant. Just like that. I didn’t know it then, of course. But I knew within a few weeks. Had I met Michael first I never would have let Rodney near me that day. But it wasn’t only Rodney I blamed for everything that happened next. It was also my own thoughts, my own desire. I wondered what I had ushered into my body, what I had permitted to grow.
CHAPTER THREE
Rodney pushed the buggy to the Sorting Stations and helped me set the clothing and household items and building materials in the right places. Then we walked to the Center together, not hand in hand, but each pinching a bit of the other’s shirt, a bit of his green wool vest between my fingers and a section of my checked button-down between his.
Lana and Michael and Talia were sitting at a table, a bowl filled with carrot peelings between them. Not the dirty scabs of the carrot skin, but sweet damp curls of inner carrot flesh that were apparently meant to be a kind of delicacy, as evidenced by Talia’s proud smile. She wasn’t smiling at us, she was smiling at Michael, who was setting a curl onto his outstretched tongue as we entered.
The first thing I noticed about Michael was the way that others stopped noticing anything else when he was in the room. He raised his eyes as we approached but Talia kept her eyes on the disappearing carrot curl and Lana, in the process of re-braiding her hair, watched Talia watch him. Without realizing it, I’d let go of the pinch of wool held between my fingers; Rodney had let go of me, too.
Michael stood to meet us. He shook our hands; his nails were clean and his grip was stiff, as though the bend of his fingers were fixed. Below a suit coat he wore a shirt buttoned all the way to the top. His dark hair lifted off his forehead and backward in a time-stopped wave, and impossibly long lashes framed blue eyes. From the height of his cheekbones the rest of his face fell down and inward, narrowing to the point of his chin. The eyes and cheekbones and hair and lashes were so striking it felt like the top half of his face was trying to distract you from the bottom. When he spoke, his teeth came as a shock, small and stunted but impeccably white. His Adam’s apple was an arrowhead buried below his skin. He felt starched in a world where starching was no longer possible.
“Welcome,” I said. I think I said. Rodney mumbled a greeting, too. “I’m Mira. This is Rodney.”
“Michael.”
“I told them already,” said Lana around the bobby pins she was holding between her teeth. She hooked a nearby stool with her leg and pulled it closer, motioned with her head for me to sit. I sat.
I don’t remember what we talked about exactly. I remember Talia peppering Michael with questions and Michael easily turning most of them back to her so that we learned almost nothing about him right away. I do remember the way we were seated: Michael on the old wooden dining room chair, Lana and Talia slightly lower on two metal chairs that looked like they belonged to a 1950s-style diner (I’d found one upside down on top of the o
ther, like someone was about to come through to mop), me on an old-fashioned milking stool and Rodney standing, arms across his chest, working his jaw side to side as he listened. I remember this acutely because I felt small and young and dumb, my held tilted upright to listen to the conversation; Rodney looked too big somehow, hulking and awkward. Only Michael, set slightly back from the table, right leg crossed over left, looked comfortable and at home. As though this had been his home from the very beginning.
I know he didn’t tell us about the Zoo then. He simply listened and asked questions of us. I didn’t really notice him eating the carrots after that first piece but by the time all of us rose, the bowl was empty.
“I promised Michael a tour,” said Lana.
“You are going to love the Babies,” said Talia.
“I’ve heard about the Babies,” said Michael.
“We’ll get you settled in the visitor quarters first,” said Rodney. “Where’s your stuff?”
By the time Rodney finished asking the question we were outside, where we could plainly see Michael’s stuff, or rather the carrier of Michael’s stuff: a bike trailer fitted with a human harness. Talia immediately pressed her head against the mesh cover while Rodney fingered the harness straps appreciatively.
“You have so much paper!” said Talia. Somehow every sentence Talia ever spoke sounded like it was being read from a children’s book. I sauntered over to the Burley and tried to gaze inside from a more respectable distance. Paper, clean paper, was one of the most difficult objects to find in the Piles.
“Smart,” said Rodney, “affixing a waist strap to the frame.”
Michael nodded.
“It looks like it’s all covered in writing. Was it like that when you found it?” Talia spoke with her cheek still pressed to the mesh. Michal didn’t move to open the bike trailer but he didn’t ask her to step away either. Lana was assiduously fastening and unfastening a button on her jade blouse, trying her best not to stare at Michael but failing miserably.
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