He was standing on a green chalkboard, the only flat space on top of Curly. He was strange among the items that were now familiar: a behemoth of a machine I thought had been used in the Before for adhering emblems to clothing, a coatrack, a stopped clock with an anchor at its center, a treadmill, the torso of a mannequin.
“Hello, Mira,” he said, and I remember that instead of feeling shock or anger, instead of feeling violated or vulnerable, what I felt most strongly upon seeing him there was shame. Shame for the grime on my shirt, shame for the sweat at the small of my back, for the scent of my own body and Rodney’s body, shame for the way we’d fought, shame for the face penned on my skin, shame for all the questions sifting through me.
“Hey,” I said to Michael as I hefted myself into an upright position. I carefully stepped onto the belt of the treadmill, wiped my sweaty hands on my shirt, tucked back the lining of a pocket that had come unstuffed. “What are you doing here?”
“There aren’t any others,” he said.
“Any other what?”
“Babies,” he said.
“Live babies? I know.”
“No,” he said, “these Babies.” I watched his eyes trail down the side of the pile to the Nesting Facility.
“So you’ve said.”
He stared at me then and his gaze was so similar to the one I’d imagined in my head only hours before that I bent my head to my notebook to hide the heat that was creeping up my neck. I wrote CRINKLE CUTS in letters as epileptic as the objects themselves.
“What do you write in there?”
I wrote CRINKLE CUTS again, in cursive this time because I couldn’t think of anything else to write.
“It’s a list.”
“It must be an important list. You’re certainly assiduous about it.”
“Things we need,” I said.
“Ah,” he said. He turned away from me then and for the first time I noticed that the line of hair across the back of his neck had been cut unevenly, that at the bottom of his coat there was a pattern of small dark stains, dirt or mud splashed in its own constellation.
“It’s quite the view.”
I nodded. Realized he couldn’t see me nodding. “It is.”
He turned back to me and studied me again without reservation or explanation. As if I were an exhibit. A light in certain old paintings. Only I wasn’t a small winged god splashing into a lake or a bonneted woman pressing a book into the dappled light on my petticoat. I stared at the blue rubber bands that bound the bottoms of my pants so they wouldn’t catch on anything as I climbed, at my Keds that were no longer even vaguely white, at the stains that spread like ripples from the toe toward the laces. I forced myself to look at him again.
“I love her,” he said. He’d been studying me so closely that for a moment I thought he meant me.
“Her?”
“Lana.”
The ground had been saturated the night before and I remember being surprised I could smell the scent of wet earth so far from the ground.
“Good for you,” I said finally.
“She feels the same.”
The world tipped incrementally, became a floor raised slightly, everything running toward a drain clogged with hair and gum wrappers and paint shards.
I shrugged. “Whatever you say.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“I believe she probably thinks she’s in love with you.”
“But it couldn’t actually be so.”
“She doesn’t know you.”
“She knows enough.”
“Why are you telling me this? It doesn’t matter what I think.”
“Your opinion means a great deal to her.”
“Lana does what she wants.”
This time he was the one to shrug. “Of course she does.” He sighed and put his hands in his pockets. “But as her best friend you can imagine how difficult this decision could be for her.”
I nodded because I had no idea what he was talking about and I refused to give him the satisfaction of asking. The decision to love him? Was that even a decision?
“But also,” he nodded knowingly back at me, “how potentially healing. Given her history in the Before.”
I kept nodding. I closed my mouth when I realized it was hanging open slightly. A pin in his lapel sparked, though it couldn’t have since there wasn’t any sun. Then he stepped closer, reached out his hand. Stupid puppet that I was, I held out mine.
We shook hands, then, his right hand in my right hand, his left hand cupping my elbow. His hand, I noticed again, strangely stiff amid the ease of his demeanor. Shame filled me again, this time for whatever it was I had just agreed to lose.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I couldn’t write a word in my notebook anymore without wondering whether that word might be the object growing inside me. Whether to write was to conjure. I touched my belly for clues. At night, lying perfectly still beside Rodney’s even breath, I imagined I felt movements. I thought of James and the Giant Peach, all those insects in the pit of the peach with their tiny legs, miniature motions undetectable on the surface of the fruit. I thought of reading the book with my father in our hammock one summer, a citronella candle burning beside us, the scent of beer on his breath. How when the day began to dim and the bats to snatch movement out of the air above us he’d set the book on his chest and close his eyes. Then he’d hum. Some mash-up of Beatles tunes and hymns and whatever ballad had been blaring on the radio that week. Sometimes melodies I hadn’t heard before, made up on the spot or pulled from another time. This was the closest I ever got to observing my father’s train of thought. He always chose his words so carefully, square paving stones continually leading somewhere. I loved the humming for the imperfections, for the way it all blurred together into a lullaby.
I should have begun collecting materials for a Nest for my own Baby. But I couldn’t do it. To do so felt like abandoning hope altogether.
Two days after my conversation with Michael I had a checkup, during which Sylvia told me in no uncertain terms that I couldn’t climb the Piles anymore.
I rolled my eyes. “Fine,” I said.
“I’m asking others to keep an eye on you,” said Sylvia. Ida nodded in agreement. “I know you’ll be tempted.”
“What is this, 1984?”
“It might be,” said Ida, too quickly, pressing her lips together against a snorting giggle. This time Sylvia was the one to roll her eyes. Ida tried to contain her laughter by slipping both hands over her mouth but the soft waves on her head were shaking so hard that soon I was laughing too.
“It might actually be nineteen eighty-four. She’s right,” I noted. “We haven’t actually considered that possibility in all our meetings.” Sylvia shook her head. “I mean,” I said, framing my face with Madonna “Vogue” hands, “this just kind of feels right to me.”
Ida jumped out of her chair and proceeded to go through a series of choreographed moves that must have been learned from watching Flashdance or Footloose a few too many times. “I’m feeling it!” said Ida, still laughing.
“I’m feeling like I’m having the time of my life, actually.”
“Nobody puts our Babies in the corner,” said Ida, pulling me off the table for a quick twirl.
“I’m feeling like this appointment is over,” said Sylvia. But I swear I saw her smile before she pulled back the curtain and left the room.
It only took about five warnings—two from Asher, one from Tenzin, and one each from Marjorie and Sven—before I realized that climbing the Piles was actually not a good idea. (The fifteen warnings from Rodney didn’t count. I just flipped him off and kept going.) All the same, climbing the Piles offered physical distance and perspective from the rest of Zion as well as the deep physical satisfaction of pushing the strength and malleability of my own body; staying grounded felt like failure.
It also meant I needed help, and since I wanted to find out what the hell Michael was talking about, I enlisted Lana. All the stren
gth and verve she’d exhibited when we were building the Nesting Facility seemed to have dissipated; she climbed delicately, often taking fifteen minutes to reach the item we actually needed because along the way she had ideas about fifty other objects she passed. It was like taking Bim to Target.
“How about this?” she said, holding up a NO PARKING sign.
“For what?”
She turned it horizontally. “Dinner plate?”
“When was the last time you used a plate?”
“Maybe we should work on being more civilized.” She extended the pinky on the hand holding the sign.
“The plastic bin. Up and to your right. You can do it, Lana.”
“Ooooohhh!” She held up a two-inch-long dangly earring made of either rhinestones or diamonds, I couldn’t tell. She turned to me, perched unsteadily on the edge of a radiator, fit the earring to her lobe, and then mimed eating delicately from the NO PARKING sign. “See, Mira. Civilized.”
“You can mine the Piles for civilized objects anytime you want, Lana. They’re always here.”
“It’s more fun with you.”
“The plastic bin. Please.”
She finally reached the bin and with a little yanking managed to unearth it. Then she turned and unceremoniously dropped it down the side of the Pile. By the time it reached me it had a thin gray crack running across the bottom, a telephone wire across an eggshell sky.
“Oops. Shitty plastic, I guess.”
I didn’t say anything. I picked up the bin, stuck it in the buggy, and walked away from Moe, though we had at least four or five items on our list to collect from the Pile.
She caught up with me. Grabbed the handle of the buggy. “I’m sorry, Mir. It’s just a bin.” One of those apologies that wasn’t really an apology. “You can still use it.”
“Not for water. Not for mixtures. Not for anything remotely resembling liquid. Not for anything heavy.”
“You said Marjorie wanted it for ghost fruit.”
“That’s not the point.”
“It isn’t?”
“No.”
“Then what is the point, Mira?” She dropped the buggy handle and stretched up to her full angry-dancer pose: chin slightly raised, chest out, flat and forward like a shield she was about to pirouette into battle. She hadn’t re-braided her hair that morning and so the crown looked like a fuzzed halo. At the corners of her eyelids, the palest smudge of blue. She didn’t wear the shadow much anymore since she barely had any left. It was reserved for days that she deemed special. Or days when she needed a little perking up. “Enlighten me,” she said.
“Are you leaving?” The question surprised even me. I hadn’t let myself consider that might be what Michael had meant.
Lana deflated. I almost laughed because she truly resembled a party balloon in her sway and crumple to the ground. She put her arms around her knees and looked up at me.
“Maybe,” she said. “I think so. I don’t know.”
“Why? Because of Michael?”
“Kind of. Yeah.” She picked at the faux jewels I’d watched her stick to her sandals the night before during Michael’s nightly oration. “I love you, Mir. You know that. I love everyone in Zion. Well, almost everyone. But I love Michael too and he doesn’t want to stay here. Since he left the Zoo he’s not a stay-in-one-place kind of guy. He wants to collect more stories. And I want to see what the rest of the world is like now.”
I sat down on the ground beside her. “It’s mostly like here, Lana. Or it’s a violent shit hole. That’s basically what all of the visitors have said.”
She shrugged. “Maybe.”
She slid her feet out of her sandals and I took them into my lap. Touched the red lines where the straps had pulled too tight. Her calluses. The nails that had fallen off and grown back thick and yellow.
“You have disgusting feet.”
“I know.” She pressed the balls of her feet gently against my belly. “I’ll come back in time for this.”
I nodded. Tilted my head toward the sky in order to keep the tears from spilling. Clouds the color of the Apple glow on my father’s laptop.
“There isn’t anything here for me the way there is for you, Mira. You have Rodney and your work making the Nests. People need you, they listen to you.”
“Right,” I said sarcastically, thinking of my fight with Rodney. “Anyway, they listen to you, too.”
She shrugged. “I’m the one who used to be the prostitute and popped out a doll. I don’t know what to do here anymore and no one wants to accuse me of laziness or not participating because they’re all afraid I’ll go off the deep end again. They think I’m fragile and weak.”
“I don’t think that,” I said, but my voice wasn’t as convincing as it should have been. “And you take care of the Nesting Facility.”
“Yes, Mira. I dust. It’s critical work. Whatever. The point is that this isn’t the person I want to be anymore. The person I am here.”
“By which you mean it’s actually the hot sex, right?” I said, pinching her big toe and smiling. But she didn’t smile back. She pulled her feet from my lap.
“That isn’t it.” Then, after a pause, “We’re not having sex.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t want to and he doesn’t ask that of me.” Her answer sounded like a line she’d been ordered to write over and over on the chalkboard so she might be convinced of its veracity.
“Huh,” I said.
“Don’t be judgey.”
“I’m not being judgey.” I wasn’t being judgey, in fact, because I had no idea how to judge this new piece of information.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Lana and Michael left two weeks later. I don’t remember the good-bye all that well. I was trying to get through it as quickly as possible. I remember that the backpack Ida crafted for Lana looked huge and unwieldy on her frame, that as the Zionites released Lana from bear hugs, she’d step back and then almost topple over. No one hugged Michael but almost everyone shook his hand. Asher and Tenzin had tried to put together a farewell band: Oscar and Kristen and Cal banged on tubs and pieces of sheet metal, Talia hit a tiny gong she’d taken from the Zen Center the first day we met her, Eleanor shook a Mason jar filled with broken plastic, and Tenzin blew into a panpipe he’d jerry-rigged out of empty bottles and leftover pipe ends. I think they were trying for “Yankee Doodle” and “When the Saints Go Marching In,” but everything sounded like a dirge. Cassie hung back, arms wrapped around her metallic blue shirt. Paloma clucked something I couldn’t hear into Lana’s ear.
I hugged Lana until she drew in her breath, until I could feel her ribs, how much smaller she’d gotten below her billowy blouses and sweatshirts. Chester gave her a Band-Aid box filled with fortunes. He cried steadily without bothering to wipe away his tears. Lana kissed them away, then looked him in the eye and said, “I’m coming back, dummy.” Sylvia offered a tiny first-aid kit. I gave Lana the necklace. She protested but I tucked it into a pocket at the back of the huge pack where she couldn’t reach without taking it off.
“Bitch,” she said affectionately.
“You better bring it back,” I said.
They headed west, toward I-35. I tried to climb Curly so I could watch them go but Rodney caught up with me, said, “Mira, you can’t,” and I said, “Fuck you, I can,” and I tried to climb and he grabbed me below my swollen belly and I clawed and pushed and sobbed but he wouldn’t let me go. So I didn’t see which way they went when they got to 35. I didn’t get to watch them disappear.
About a week after Lana left, Paloma birthed a canteen, covered with camouflage fabric and filled with a handful of coins. The coins were rubbed free of faces, of letters, of buildings or animals, anything that might connect the metal to a country or a moment in time. I was there just after the birth when she shook the coins out onto the skin between her breasts, covered with a fluttering of moles, when she rubbed a few of the coins with her thumb as though she could bring the markings back. Then she re
turned the coins to the vessel, handed it to me, and turned her head to face the counter, to stare blankly at the haphazard instruments arranged on a tea towel.
“Mmmmm,” she said, “mmmmmmm.” A sound made almost entirely of breath, a teakettle at the end of its whistle. No tears, just the aching whine and her bare thighs shaking.
Ida put a blanket over her chest and while Sylvia cleaned away the afterbirth I massaged Paloma’s calves, her feet still housed in socks and the pair of duct-taped Crocs she’d worn since the Rending. I thought of sitting beside my mother while she shaved her legs in the bath, shaving cream foamed into a perfect ball and skin revealed in perfect swaths cut through the white. My father cleaned the windshield at the gas station using those same methodical strokes, making bird shit and the dried corpses of bugs disappear with even sweeps of the squeegee. In the Before I was certain my parents loved each other but since the Rending, when I remembered them, it was separately. They were always in different frames. When I tried to remember them touching or what love had looked like between them I couldn’t find a memory. So it was a small kind of comfort to connect them through this motion, as though an entire marriage could survive on the way a couple swept a surface clean.
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