The Rending and the Nest

by Kaethe Schwehn

  “It’s my writing,” he said. “Stories.” He looked at Lana as he said it. The skin of her neck turned red.

  “Like, novels?” said Talia.

  “No, Talia. The stories of others. I collect them. Share them. This is my work.” Still, he didn’t move to unfasten the cover.

  “Like a library?” Talia’s fingers slid over the metal buttons that held the cover closed.

  “Not exactly.”

  “I’d love to read all of this,” said Talia.

  “I’d be glad to read all of it to you, Talia.” Talia smiled. The fact that she was imagining her own body cat-curled next to Michael’s as he entertained her with a private story was clear.

  “I’d be glad to read it all to everyone,” Michael clarified. Talia’s face fell. “I’d like to listen to your stories and add them to my collection.”

  Talia’s face brightened again. “I had a lot of premonitions about the Rending before the Rending.” This was new to all of us. “And my mother was part Gypsy. And my dairy allergy has disappeared entirely.”

  “We don’t eat any dairy,” said Lana.

  “Gone. Entirely,” said Talia, raising her eyebrows.

  Michael nodded. “Show me the Babies,” he said, reaching out his hand to Lana. She took it and we all followed, Talia a half stutter-step behind them, Rodney pulling the trailer, and finally me, a flame of panic rising between my ribs for no reason I could quite understand. To calm myself I took out my notebook, wrote: unicycle, motorcycle, the silver ding of Bim’s tricycle.

  Michael didn’t touch the Babies. He reached his hand as close as humanly possible without touching. When Bim was little and couldn’t sleep we’d play a game where he’d close his eyes and raise his shirt. I’d hover my fingertips close to his skin, over the blue-veined root system across his chest, or the puckered mouth of his belly button, or the tiered plateau of his ribs to see if he could guess, from the heat of my fingertips alone, where exactly I was in the dark. I hated the idea of the Babies haunted by the heat of a stranger. And then I hated myself for caring, for believing the Babies could feel anything.

  I raised my eyes from his hands to his face; Michael returned my stare. And I swear he moved his hand a few millimeters closer to the Baby to watch the way my disdain increased. I swear, even then, he was measuring the way he changed me.

  Talia prattled on about the Naming Ceremonies and about who had given birth to which baby when. With the sleeve of her jade blouse, Lana dusted off the pedestal. Michael listened to what Talia said, nodding. He nodded almost constantly, as though each swing of his head inserted a new piece of information into his system. But even as he listened I could tell a part of his mind was elsewhere. My father had a friend who visited us once, an older woman who had studied geology before women really studied geology. She sat stiffly through dinner, elbows off the table, salmon extracted methodically from the bone. The rest of us pulled the white slivers we missed from our mouths but she was surgical about the process. There were no mistakes. And though she engaged in conversation I could see that what we were talking about (my gross science partner, whether the aid to Haitians was proving sufficient, how Bim got to be Aquaman that day and Freddy had to be Spiderman) was not enough to occupy her mind, that it was always reaching and sprawling its tentacles into other caverns and depths. She couldn’t help herself. I hadn’t seen someone like her, someone that fiercely intelligent, since the Rending.

  “These carriers. These beds. Who made them?”

  “They’re Nests,” said Talia. Lana smiled encouragingly at me.

  “I made them,” I said, stepping forward, toward Michael, as though I were volunteering for something. I wasn’t physically attracted to Michael, I didn’t want him in the way that Lana and Talia clearly did. But I could tell from the easy way he held himself, from the cleanliness of his hair, from the reams of paper in the bike trailer, that Michael carried with him real knowledge of elsewhere. I wanted him to see me as the person most worthy to receive this information, wanted, when he looked at me, for his brain not to be distracted by any other thing.

  Rodney stood behind me in the doorway wearing the harness, an ox still yoked to the Burley, maintaining a silence that, beside Michael, looked a lot like stupidity.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Michael’s story unfolded on the following Friday when, true to form when we had visitors, many of us gathered in the Center to hear stories of elsewhere. But unlike the visitors who had come before, Michael was a storyteller. Not the hyper-engaged, roly-poly, perspiring and spit-flecked kind of storyteller like the one who used to come every year to our elementary school, a sixty-year-old white woman who told us about Anansi the Spider while shaking a gourd rattle. Michael didn’t need to lean forward. He sat as he had that first afternoon: settled, legs crossed, one arm slung over the back of the chair. The hand on the other arm was always in motion though, a fist carving fossils and fissures and wounds in the air.

  Lana sat next to him, on an old La-Z-Boy recliner, her legs dangling over one arm, her back resting against the other. She kept her hands busy that whole first night, re-braiding her hair or inefficiently mending a shirt or shuffling and reshuffling an incomplete deck of cards. (The queen of hearts and jack of spades were missing; Lana always suspected an illicit affair.) The rest of us sat on the motley assortment of chairs and benches, blankets and pillows. And Cal, as always, on his pool float.

  I can’t capture Michael’s storytelling on paper, the whip-stitch of his voice, the gestures wormed into the air, his perpetual ease. But this is what he told us that first night.

  People went to the Zoo initially for the same reason people went anywhere just after the Rending: to see who or what had been left behind. Most of the animals were gone, of course. A sea otter remained in the Russia’s Grizzly Coast exhibit; a fruit bat, a cockroach, and a puffer fish on the Tropics Trail had survived the Rending but all quickly died because no one was willing to feed the animals, not when human survival was uncertain and it was unclear how much food remained on the earth.

  The habitats themselves were mostly intact: A few faux boulders had disappeared, strips of vegetation and portions of barriers (glass, railings, walls) had been erased. At first the people Michael saw step into the habitats did so out of curiosity, to see if the boa was still curled below a log or out of a sense of dark humor, miming apes or warty pigs. Then people staked out the habitats as territory. This was a few months after the Rending, around the time we formed Zion, when settling began to feel more sensible than wandering.

  Things went on that way for a few months, Michael told us. The majority of the community constructed dwellings on the fields where the camels and pronghorn used to putter. Labor was divided and seeds were planted. They found, as we did, that root crops did well but anything that grew above the surface did poorly. In addition to ghost fruit they had stings, a hard, brown, marble-size fruit that grew on gnarled vines, bitter with a touch of sweetness at the core. People sucked on stings constantly; like coca leaves or chewing gum, stings gave a flavor to the gray of life after the Rending. To stand near someone in the Zoo was to hear the tiny clicks of stings against teeth.

  Unlike here in Zion, the people who inhabited the Zoo were aggressive and methodical about the two Piles close by, enlisting everyone available to dismantle them. Early on, a woman had suggested that maybe there was something or someone below it all, her words conjuring up footage of earthquake devastation in which the camera reveals a sudden hand or foot, twitching below mounds of rubble. So they spread the materials over a mile-wide stretch to the south of the Zoo. They started by trying to sort the objects into smaller piles, as we did, but they quickly found that most of the objects were too random, too useless, to afford use in any pile. The sorting pile in which they were supposed to place all the “useless” items grew larger and larger as the original Pile grew smaller.

  But there was nothing. Below the objects were more objects and finally just dirt. And because they hadn’t
really developed a system, hadn’t catalogued or kept track, they ended up with a field studded with crap and a new Pile two-thirds the size of the original.

  (How was it that in all my years of climbing the Piles, I had never had this thought, never wondered if there was something at the bottom, something below? I was grateful that it turned out not to matter, glad that Zionites had avoided wasting their energy on a fruitless task, but it made me wonder what other possibilities I hadn’t considered, what other explanations all of us had failed to imagine.)

  By that point it was late. So we asked Michael to continue the story the next night. So he did. And the next night. And the next night and the next.

  It was in the second year that the Zoo began to turn. That’s what Michael called it, a turning. By then there were around two hundred curious pilgrims, with more arriving all the time. Those newly arrived always wanted to walk the trails and paths, to tour the Zoo as they would have in the Before. But now instead of staring at snow monkeys, they watched the new human Inhabitants: a bearded man sewing together kids’ clothing to make a blanket, or a guy with a mustache tattooed on his biceps trying to construct a laundry line from wires he’d ripped out of the bowels of a stereo.

  From there the newly arrived could move on to the old tortoise enclosure, where an elderly woman washed other people’s undergarments—only undergarments because they weren’t too heavy—and hung them on the remaining bits of vegetation to dry. She’d come to the edge of the barrier wall to talk, resting her forearms on stone. Though the temperatures on the Tropics Trail were no longer tropical, she always wore tank tops, the wrinkled white skin of her arms mirroring the drying fabric behind her.

  Then one of the newly arrived made the mistake of feeding one of the enclosure Inhabitants. Michael didn’t see it happen himself. He thinks it was something simple, a bag of Fritos volleyed over the dry moat of the tiger enclosure or maybe a can of cream of mushroom soup left on a rock in the porcupine habitat. Suddenly, those who had made their homes in the enclosures realized that others would pay for the privilege of observing—pay in food or supplies, in pages of naked women folded into paper airplanes, in nail clippers, in soap. Those who arrived and had nothing to offer simply had to walk the half-mile to the nearest water source and offer a refilled can or bottle to the Inhabitants.

  Michael paused at that point in the story. “When I was a kid,” he began. I remember he said this because it was so strange to consider that Michael had ever been a kid. I could only imagine him exactly the same but smaller: same suit coat, same swept-back hair, same studded white teeth and nodding head, fisted hand moving delicately through the air. “When I was a kid,” he said, “we’d try to divide everyone in the world into two categories. Those who love summer and those who despise it. Those who could swing across the creek on a rope and those who couldn’t. Those who could eat a jalapeño without pissing themselves and those who could not. It seems like a silly childish pastime.

  “But it turns out we weren’t far from the truth. The Zoo proved that the world can be divided into two categories: those who like to watch and those who like to be watched. And the more interesting you were, the more worthy of being watched, the more you were paid.”

  Cal interrupted: “Is this how it is still, now, today?” (Cal had moved from his pool float over to Lana’s recliner so she could try to twine his hair into dreadlocks.)

  Michael nodded his head. “Probably. I left six months ago to collect stories. But yes, as far as I know the men are still in the snow monkey cage. They’re usually paid the least but sometimes pulling down their pants, or singing a drinking ballad, arms wound around each other doing Rockette kicks, sometimes that amuses people. And the woman who used to wash undergarments doesn’t do it for food anymore. She only washes her own. But she comes to the wall and if you want she’ll take your face between her hands and tell you how proud she is of you. People leave her food and also things that remind them of their grandparents. So her enclave is now filled with sachets, with owl figurines, with glass birds and embroidered pillows.

  “The Tropics Trail aquarium is drained. Inside, four women who call themselves the Furies go topless, cloaks around their shoulders. They take requests if the requests are sent on paper that contains a blank side. Or if the request is inscribed inside a book that looks appealing. They’ll do what’s asked—lick each other, spank each other. The red-haired one will put her pen in the anus of the brown-haired one. The brown-haired one with the curls will be absolutely still while the red-haired one urinates on her breasts. The one with short blonde hair will bend over, close to the glass, and press her bottom against it. They will not hurt one another; nor will they feign delight or excitement. They’ll do all of this for paper, to write or draw on, I suppose. No one knows exactly because as soon as the act is done they retreat to the far reaches of the aquarium, behind a barrier they’ve constructed. Only the backs of their bare shoulders, or a swatch of fabric or a swirl of hair, is visible.

  “On the Minnesota Trail it’s rare to actually see any of the Inhabitants. The Watchers come because they like the challenge. The Inhabitants have constructed amazing blinds—large forts, really—scraps of fabric sewn together and jerry-rigged into what looks like a childhood version of a stage. Except the curtains never part and through the gaps in the curtains you can sometimes spot a flash of skin, the undulation of a different colored fabric, or the press of a body shifting the curtain outward. Every so often an Inhabitant at the far end of the enclosure begins a song or a chant. The next in line picks it up, changes the tune or carries the note until the next Inhabitant picks it up. Sometimes it takes thirty minutes for the sound to travel all the way up the line, sometimes only thirty seconds. It’s quite amazing, really, to hear.”

  “And what were you,” said Rodney, finally. “When you lived at the Zoo, before you began this story-collecting business. Were you a Watcher or a captive?”

  “They aren’t captives,” said Michael, “they are Inhabitants. They are free to go at any time.”

  “What were you?” Rodney asked again.

  “I was the keeper,” said Michael.

  The next night Michael picked up the thread again in a more professorial mode. He stood instead of sitting, hands plunged into the pockets of his suit coat. The gestures that he couldn’t contain lifted the coat up, revealing the shine of the silky interior.

  “I know all of you have questions about the Zoo. You should have questions about the Zoo. I can imagine how strange it seems. How horribly unnatural.”

  There were nods and murmurs.

  “The Watchers don’t spend all their time watching. I don’t mean to suggest that. Most of their time is spent the way you spend your time: figuring out how to eat, how to build dwellings that won’t collapse, how to dispose of waste and sewage, trying to determine what can be scavenged, what will likely never appear. They’ve distributed tasks, delegated work, formulated rules for sharing resources. They try to make their lives more efficient. They’re reinventing the world. The same inventions again: how to make an oven, how to irrigate plants, how to—” and here Michael rolled his hand through the air so we could see how the list went on and on.

  “But it’s still appalling, isn’t it? All of this? Even with everything we do to make life manageable it’s still only that. Manageable. You can’t go more than three minutes without feeling loss. Without wondering for the fiftieth time that day what happened. The Watchers want to turn away from their work and see something that isn’t loss or a half-assed attempt at resurrection. The Zoo is a strangeness that isn’t this strangeness.

  “Human beings, it turns out, are deliciously simple and deliciously stupid. Whatever world we are in, we want to imagine a different one. In the Before this manifested itself in a variety of ways: for the religious it was heaven, for the climate activists it was the return of bucolic arcadia; most of America believed in a world created by advertisements; academics spun out their other intellectual planets of thou
ght. Even the children wanted yellow brick roads and talking pigs. You may have forgotten but I guarantee you were not happy with the world you were living in before the Rending. You were imagining an elsewhere then, too. But you’ve forgotten. The Before has become your Eden, the land to which you long to return. It wasn’t better then. Not really. It was simply different.”

  Michael stopped talking but kept looking at us, at all of us in turn. Ida, who was sitting against the wall making a mobile for the Nesting Facility, let out a sigh pitched somewhere between contentment and consternation. It was quiet enough that I could hear Sylvia’s pen scraping over a page in her notebook, Asher unsnapping the plastic fastener on the back of his hat, the muted thump of Paloma’s braid as she swung it over her shoulder.

  Tenzin cleared his throat. “We should probably move on to the meeting.” Then, when no one spoke: “It’s Wednesday.”

  “Is there really much to discuss?” asked Zephyr. “Seems like discussing the best way to dispose of potato peels or who pissed who off could wait a couple weeks. What he’s saying”—here he nodded at Michael—“seems more important. We know almost nothing about what the hell is going on out there. Most of the visitors tell us jack shit. Maybe it’s time to listen for a while instead of talking about what maybe didn’t cause the Rending for the five hundredth time.”

  Talia stood abruptly, tucking her hair behind her ears. “I think Michael has a lot of wisdom to offer. I think we should listen.”

  Zephyr nodded and then spoke again as though Michael weren’t three feet from him: “I’m not saying we do anything except hear him out.”

  From where I sat near the door at the back I could see Asher shrug, could hear the sound of Sylvia’s neck pop as she tilted her head to the side. Eleanor, glasses pushed to the top of her head, nodded slightly though her eyes were closed. Rodney, beside me, squeezed my thigh, but I didn’t know what he meant by it—that he agreed with Zephyr? That we should proceed with caution? That I should keep my mouth shut?