Though there was nothing I wanted to say, I felt like there should be. Like something was being decided.
“All in favor,” asked Zephyr.
A muted chorus of “yea”s.
“Against?”
No one said a word. But in the darkness of the back of the room I watched as Chester turned and walked out the door.
For the first time since the Rending, Chester looked surprised to see me enter his room. He wasn’t in his rocking chair, didn’t have a book open on his lap or a pen at the ready. His owl eyes looked so startled that it took me a second to notice that he was holding a gun. He was holding it in front of him, cradling it with both hands, palms open, as though about to offer it up to something or someone.
“Chester,” I said.
His eyes were on mine. He was giving me one of his I-will-crawl-deep-down-inside-you-and-rummage-around-to-see-what-I-find stares. He didn’t say anything.
“Where the hell did you get a gun? How long have you had it? Did you find it in one of the Piles? Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you bring it to a meeting? Chester.”
He squinted slightly and I noticed the tiny lines around the corners of his eyes. I stepped closer.
“Chester, give it to me.” It was what I thought I was supposed to say, perhaps because I thought he was going to do damage to himself or to me. He offered it to me abruptly, with both hands, and I received it with both of mine. I sat down on the stool with the embroidery on top.
It felt the way a gun is supposed to feel, heavy and cold. There were raised rectangles on the grip. For decoration? They made it look reptilian. As did the trigger, which emerged like a pointed tongue, floating in the empty space made by the trigger guard. The barrel was slightly darker on the top than the bottom. I ran my thumb gently over the raised letters that spelled out KEL-TEC.
“Front sight. Rear sight. Muzzle. Magazine release.” Chester whispered the parts almost reverently as I touched them.
I looked at Chester again. He sat down in the rocking chair. Between us, on the table, the sight of the dental X-rays, of the impression of human flesh on the retainer, made me feel like I’d touched my tongue to the tip of a battery. In the toothbrush holder, four rolled fortunes sat unclaimed; I had no desire to unroll one. I set the gun on the table; beside it, the other objects looked horribly familiar.
“I had it,” he said after a long time.
I waited for more.
“At the Rending.”
“At the Rending.”
“Like you had the necklace. I had the gun.”
“I didn’t see it.”
“I had it. Tucked in the back of my jeans.”
“We walked for weeks, Chester.”
He nodded.
“I would have noticed it.”
He shrugged. “You didn’t.”
“Someone would have noticed it.”
“Rodney did.”
“Rodney knows you have a gun? Rodney knows you have this?”
He nodded.
“I don’t believe you.”
He nodded again. “I can understand why you wouldn’t.”
“Don’t put therapist psychobabble onto me, Chester. You had a fucking gun. You have a gun.”
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters.”
“I don’t have any ammunition. It’s not loaded. It can’t be used. How is it any different than your necklace?”
“If it didn’t matter—if it doesn’t matter—then why not tell everyone? Why not hand it over?”
“What if you did find ammunition, Mira? We’ve heard from more than one visitor that no one has found a gun in the Piles but what if there is ammunition? What if it could become a weapon?”
“Then we’d deal with it. We’d figure it out.” I heard my voice climbing. “Don’t you trust us, Chester? Don’t you trust me?”
“Mira.”
I fixed my gaze on the gun.
“Mira, look at me.”
I looked at him briefly, then away, like I was fourteen again.
“I trust you. If you want me to go over to the Center right now, I will. I’ll turn it over to everyone. We can have a meeting about it. If that’s what you want.” He stood up so forcefully the rocking chair almost tipped, then swung back, with equal force, banging the backs of his calves. He didn’t flinch. He held out his hand to me. “Come on, let’s go.”
I thought of Michael. The swept-back crest of his hair. Lana’s arm, beneath his suit coat, hugging his waist. I thought of men in the Zoo pulling down their pants, jiggling their dicks for a jar of Tang.
I shook my head. I left his room without looking at him again. I hated the damn beads for not being a door that I could slam.
It was only after I was back in my room, alone, that I realized I hadn’t asked him why he had the gun in the first place. Why Chester, with his collared shirts and Birkenstock sandals, with his silences and scribbled fortunes, why this boy-man I had grown to love as a brother had been holding a gun at the moment of the Rending.
It was easy, after that first skipped meeting, to postpone the next one. And the next. There was nothing urgent to discuss and everyone seemed content to gather and listen to Michael. When he finished the story of the Zoo he was more than happy to read other stories from his collection, eight-and-a-half- by eleven-inch memoirs of other lives. After seven days no one mentioned that his time as a visitor was officially up.
During the day he used Lana’s room to record the stories of Zionites. Ida went one day, curious, and shrugged a lot when we asked her how it had gone. Said it was nice to be listened to, that he had asked good questions, that every once in a while she’d looked at him and he’d be staring over her head where Lana’s mirror fed his reflection back to him.
Chester spent more time sitting in the blue stadium seats between his room and mine, a Packers blanket thrown over his lap, watching the steady stream of Zionites enter and leave Lana’s room. Michael’s presence rendered Chester’s own skill set considerably less useful. Chester listened too but he didn’t ask questions and he didn’t write anything down. He was a sponge. Michael was the Rosetta stone. It turned out that people who had no interest in having their lives documented in the Before wanted to be known, remembered, and catalogued in the After. We had no children to carry on versions of ourselves, no families to stretch our DNA across the country. We wanted—we want—to be remembered; Michael offered this and Chester did not.
But it wasn’t just stories; Michael participated in community life in other ways, too: turned compost, collected wood, helped Cal check the lines for fish. He even accompanied Tenzin to old Zion, ostensibly to scavenge building materials, though I’m certain Tenzin showed him Deborah’s resting place, stood with Michael in front of the house without a face.
It seems strange, in retrospect, that none of us called Michael on the seven-day rule or talked more openly about feeling disconcerted by his presence. Lana and Talia were infatuated, but Chester and Rodney were certainly more savvy and suspicious. But whatever lurking premonitions we carried, Michael was different, different from all of us, and we couldn’t turn away. Until we met Michael we hadn’t noticed it in ourselves: the way we’d been worn down by the last five years, our edges scuffed, need rippling always below the surface of our skins. Michael was like an upper-middle-class person from the Before. He moved through the world as though he knew pumpkin pie and TiVo and a hot tub awaited him at the end of the day. A confidence born of sufficiency. We all wanted to know where that came from, that perpetual sense that he had enough.
Those were the early days of my pregnancy and they passed in a blur of objects and stories. I was the one on Sylvia’s examining table once a month, I was the one Ida spoke to softly while Sylvia measured the growth of my uterus, while she palpated my abdomen and jotted notes in a blue exam book with my name written on the front. I told Sylvia I wanted to climb the Piles until I was on my hands and knees, pushing this piece of kitsch out of me, bu
t Sylvia sternly forewarned me that after the fourth month I’d have to stop, said that if I fell the object could break, could leave sharp edges inside of me. So I tried to prepare for this future restriction by focusing my attention on the base of the Piles, searching for small objects, mostly for the Nests, which could be extracted without shifting the structure of the Pile itself. I found a set of nesting dolls for Marjorie and a wide-brimmed straw hat to keep the nonexistent sun off of Sven’s face while he picked ghost fruit. He was forever checking the moles on his balding scalp with a handheld Gucci mirror.
From the top of Curly or Moe I often saw Lana and Michael walking. From that distance Lana’s skirts made her appear wider, more grounded, while Michael rose up, a lever with the potential to move the earth. If they were close enough, I could see the thin line that connected them: outstretched arms, hand to hand. There wasn’t a rule about how far you could wander from Zion. Zionites had left and returned before, often to trade on the I-35 corridor or sometimes just to be gone, away from the rest of us for a week or more. But the third rule did state that if you wandered more than a mile from the Center and you didn’t return, no one would come looking. Lana and Michael were pushing the edge of that boundary on their walks. Lana knew it. I didn’t say a word. Instead I offered her a skirt with gingerbread trim, a belt that buckled in a snug heart across her belly.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Don’t put all your weight on that,” I said. Cal was twenty feet above me, bouncing up and down on a railroad-crossing arm, holding on to a protruding rain gutter with one hand to keep his balance. He kept bouncing. “Cal! We want the whole thing if we can get it. Can you slide it out?”
He shook his head and continued to bounce.
“Cal! Don’t!” I hated how much I sounded like my mother. Hated that as I yelled at Cal I reflexively touched my own small belly and willed the wobble of the crossing arm into my uterus. Nothing.
“For this to work you actually have to listen to me,” I continued, but I’d already climbed halfway to where Cal bounced by the time I said it. I grabbed the crossing arm and took a minute to catch my breath. “You’re right not to try to slide something out if it’s going to upset the balance,” I said, trying to keep my voice light and positive, “but if you do need to break it, get a tool. Get Rodney to give you a saw from the shed.”
“I don’t want a fucking saw,” said Cal. He was generally sweet and passive. This rage was new. Cal whined pretty continually about having to do work; he wanted his work to be art (sculpting elephant figurines from Zephyr’s leftover mixture material, creating mosaics on the walls of the Center from broken ceramic shards) but since he had been fourteen when we formed Zion, the initial consensus was that he needed to be an apprentice to the adult community members.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
Lana’s attempts at taming his hair into dreadlocks had mostly failed; Cal’s hair was nappy, fuzzed into chunks that made it look like he’d been hibernating. “Nothing,” he said. He wouldn’t look at me. From just above his right elbow he pulled a bowling shoe out of the Pile. Size ten and a half. He chucked it as far as he could.
“Your shirt’s on backward,” I observed.
He pulled his collar forward and saw the tag. Then he pulled the shirt off, balled it up, and chucked it, too. It opened in flight and caught on the edge of a kidney-shaped table. Cal crossed his arms in the sudden cold. Goose bumps flared across his shoulder blades.
“You can tell me,” I said quietly.
“He’s a perv,” he said—or I thought he said—before he climbed down. He left his shirt on the Pile. Walked back to his room with his arms stiff at his sides, hands balled into fists as if he could keep the chill contained within them.
I tried to extract more out of Cal later, both surreptitiously and overtly, vague inquiries about his “OK-ness” as we sat in the Center popping ghost fruit and direct interrogation as we circled the bottom of Moe, checking for tagged objects. Had he said perv? Did he mean Michael? Had Michael done something? But by then Cal’s sunny disposition had returned, as had his cheerful capacity to ignore me.
CHAPTER SIX
Rodney cupped my swollen breasts. I kissed his palm, right in the center, and then took his fingers in my mouth when he entered me. When he paused I took up the rhythm on his fingers. He burrowed his face in my hair, pressed his teeth into my neck, tried to pull his fingers from my mouth, but I held them tight and then rocked back suddenly against his still, held body. When he came inside me I thought of Michael, not naked or undressing, not touching my skin or his. Just Michael’s gaze, unwavering, on me. Fixed on me until I became a singular sun, purposed, chosen.
Rodney rolled me on my back and kissed the soft brown line from my navel to my pubic bone, measuring the length with his mouth, measuring me with his mouth until my whole body tightened, my abdomen rock-hard, a seismic shattering on my skin.
Afterward I used my teeth to rip open a new pack of Bic pens I’d found on Moe. Tried to spit the plastic out of my mouth in a celebratory fashion.
“Doesn’t this belong at the Sorting Stations?” he asked. “Are you being naughty?”
I blushed. “I’ll put them there eventually.”
He rolled me so that I was sitting on top of him. “Seems like you’re taking advantage of your position.”
“Maybe I am,” I said, rocking my hips back and forth suggestively—though since we’d just finished, the suggestion was a little half-hearted.
“Lemme see one of those.” I handed him a pen. “Close your eyes.” I did. The light slide of the tip over my breasts, my belly made me feel like a rink. Ice skates, hockey puck, Zamboni. “Now open.”
I looked down. He’d drawn eyelashes around the tops of my areolas, cat’s-eye glasses around the swell of my breasts, and a nose on my swollen belly. My belly button was a mouth pursed into an “O” of surprise that now sported a Hitler-style mustache.
“Very funny,” I said. “My turn.”
He handed me the pen. “I’m keeping my eyes open,” he said.
I wiped my hand over the top of his left thigh where the hair was sparse. “Lizard or frog?”
“Lizard.”
While I drew I told him about my conversation with Cal, about all of my suspicions. He nodded or said “sure,” his favorite stale-wafer word. Rodney tended to give people the benefit of the doubt until he didn’t. His judgment suspended and hovered but when it fell it fell hard and there was no changing it. I chattered while he drew a constellation on the back of my hand (just the points of light; to connect the dots would be cheating) and a twining branch of ivy around my right index finger.
“Well, what do you think?” I said finally.
“About what?”
“About Michael.”
Rodney paused. He traced the connections between the dots on my hand with his finger over and over again. “I don’t trust the guy.”
“But …”
“I also think he’s been spending a lot of time with Lana.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I know things are better between you two, but they’re not back to the way they were before.”
“Things between us are fine.”
“OK,” he said, “I’m sure they are. I just know she’s your friend and you haven’t been seeing each other as much.”
“You’re saying I’m jealous? Do you think I’m twelve? Have you been listening at all to what I’ve been saying?”
“I have.”
“Cal? The Zoo? Being a keeper—whatever the fuck that means? Having these little secret meetings with everyone in Zion? The way he holds forth with his stories? The way everyone just flocks around him? Just eats up whatever he says?” I didn’t like the way my voice had risen to a squeak. He tried to do another dot-to-dot and I pulled my hand away.
“What do you want me to say, Mira?”
“I want you to say that you don’t think I’m crazy. That you agree with me.”
&
nbsp; “I don’t think you’re crazy.”
“But you don’t think we have anything to be worried about?”
“I don’t trust any of the visitors, Mira. I think they’re all fucked up. Michael doesn’t seem any different to me.” He shrugged. “I think you miss Lana.”
“Screw you.”
He got out of bed. Dressed without saying anything. I pulled the covers to my chin, curled onto my side, pressed my hand to the side of my belly. Willed movement, a fluttering.
He started down the ladder. One rung, two, three, four. He stopped. I didn’t turn. “I’m sorry I have an opinion that’s different from yours, Mira. I guess I forgot that’s not allowed.”
Then he was gone.
I dressed quickly and headed out to Curly without bothering to find Cal or grab the buggy. I needed hay or straw, something to finish the nest for Paloma’s Baby, soon to be born. Maybe crinkle-cut paper, the packing material that nestled the vases my mother ordered from Crate and Barrel and Williams-Sonoma. When the first few had arrived my father had asked whether we needed so many vases, but my mother had said she was collecting them, that she was allowed a collection. She didn’t display them anywhere. She’d re-nestle each vase back in its bower of crinkle cuts and close the box and then take the box down to the basement.
At four months, at the cusp of when I was supposed to stop climbing, my own belly wasn’t incredibly noticeable. Some women, even early on, grew bellies that seemed only thinly connected to their frames, swollen and pluckable, not a part of them at all. Mine looked like the vague swell of an ancient burial ground.
The small of my back was wet; I was panting. The oxygen felt thinner, less satisfying. I was looking for straw, but each time I pressed upward, calf lengthening, hand groping for the next handhold above me, I noted the drawing on my right index finger, the ring that wasn’t a ring, the ring that was on the wrong finger, that with each day would become less visible, less able to hold any meaning. What would my parents have thought of my relationship with Rodney—known but unspecified, joined but not promised? We hadn’t vowed anything to one another, hadn’t brought up the future—was this failure on my part? Or his? Or was this just the way we needed to live now that the future was perpetually uncertain, now that God had disappeared into the ether? Was this the way things always should have been anyway? Had marriage always been a stupid patriarchal tradition? Was my creeping desire for marriage, for some kind of promise, was it a result of our fight or just a desire for faux certainty in a world that would no longer ever be certain? Or was it that the combination of Michael’s arrival, his story of the Zoo, Chester’s gun, Lana’s naïveté, and the strangeness inside my own body made me want to hitch myself to a fixed point? But then I thought of Deborah and Tenzin, ready to set up their lives in that strange broken house; a part of me ached for that kind of declaration, if not in words then in a singular, solidifying act.
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