When Sylvia was done cleaning her, Paloma dressed, wrapped the blanket around her, and walked to her room, shoulders back, looking half-regal and half-homeless. I remember how she didn’t hunch into herself, how much dignity there was in her posture.
As tempted as I am to pretend things fell apart after Lana left, they didn’t. Community meetings resumed, a leader guiding us through Announcements and Rules and Zephyr suggesting during Issues and Ideas that maybe the Rending was really just a complicated reality show and didn’t we remember that movie with Jim Carrey where his life was actually a television show but he didn’t realize it and did we remember signing some kind of consent form in the weeks before the Rending because he recalled some kind of form.
Chester named Paloma’s Baby Sonata and Paloma requested that everyone hold hands at the Naming Ceremony while we sang “Santo, Santo, Santo.” Most of us didn’t know the words but the tune was familiar because, I realized partway through the singing, it had always been on the edge of Paloma’s breath, a humming that existed at the fringes of her like an aura.
A month passed and then another. I got bigger and then bigger again. Began to watch for Lana’s return, occasionally thinking I saw her out of the corner of my eye and then turning to find Kristen or Cassie instead. I compulsively checked my belly for edges, for outlines, pressing into the skin to see what I could feel. There weren’t any other Babies on the way, or no one who was admitting to being pregnant or showing the signs, so the only Nest I should have been working on was my own. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. So mostly I helped Cal and Tenzin, spotting items for them from the ground while they scrambled on the Piles. Sometimes I sat with Ida, cutting unwanted pieces of clothing into neat squares for her to quilt. I spent one day transferring the smaller containers of ghost fruit Marjorie and Sven collected into the larger plastic bin, each load further testing the thin plastic crack that ran the length of the bottom. Still, Lana did not return.
Visitors continued to trickle through. A man with a crutch and a Bob Marley T-shirt told us he had come from the east, from a town where prayer was currency. Prayers of thanksgiving for any semblance of food, for the dull gray light that woke them in the morning, for the saturation of the crops. You couldn’t pass anyone else without offering and receiving a blessing. He thought the prayer was supposed to release them or comfort them or make them feel more secure but he said he just felt like the sky kept getting lower. Pressing down. Then one day he heard a guy say a blessing over the shit he’d just taken in the woods and he couldn’t take it anymore.
Then there was a couple, a woman and a man who called themselves peddlers. Inside their floor-length coats they’d fastened travel kits, the kind you can open and hang up when you arrive somewhere fancy, the kind that reveal your toiletries in separate zipped plastic sections. And the bizarre thing was that the pouches contained all of those things, all of the items you’d expect: razors and toothbrushes, floss and fingernail clippers and Q-Tips with fuzzed heads still white and unsullied.
“Where did you get these things?” asked Paloma. We were in the Center. She sat on a chair and touched delicately the plastic that covered the objects. The female visitor stood very still, her coat outstretched like she was a wire display rack we could turn to pull other objects into view. “Where?” asked Paloma again.
“No one place,” said the woman.
“Takes time,” said the man.
“We could make a trade,” said the man. He took out a razor and removed the safety guard. The blade was bright, unmarried with whiskers of hair.
“What do you want?” asked Paloma.
The corner of his lip twitched; he raised his eyebrows slightly then tilted his head a few degrees toward the Nesting Facility.
“No,” said Paloma. She placed both her hands on the table and heaved herself to her feet.
The night before my thirty-six-week checkup a man arrived from the north. He didn’t speak. We weren’t sure if he couldn’t or wouldn’t. His tongue was too big for his mouth and it was always moving, creeping out around the edges of his lips, worrying the tender skin so that it grew red and chapped. Instead of speaking, he drew. He wore a navy apron with the outline of Kansas on the front and his name, Willis, written in white chalk underneath. In the pockets of the apron he kept writing utensils: stubs of charcoal and chalk, a ballpoint pen he could coax ink out of via persistent licking of the nib, a purple pencil, a burnt-sienna crayon. Instead of helping pick ghost fruit or harvest root vegetables or sweep walkways he drew sketches of people or scenes. We had a few mirrors but no visual recording of our lives since the Rending. We’d left behind (mostly without much withdrawal) selfies and Instagram, photo booths and Photoshop, computers crowded with thousands of images of where we’d been and who we’d loved. We mourned the absence of any visual catalogue of our personal worlds in the Before, of course. A few Zionites were lucky enough to have pictures in wallets or purses that survived but for most of us the images we carried were memories, blurred with nostalgia, changed permanently by the simple act of remembering.
But until Willis arrived, we hadn’t realized how hungry we’d been for physical proof of this life. Michael had gathered written proof but he’d taken all of the stories with him; the Zionites who had poured out their lives to him had felt momentary gratification but retained no evidence for themselves. Willis used Lana’s room for the portraits just as Michael had for the stories. I dragged Rodney in one afternoon; I wanted to see him on a page through someone else’s eyes but I also wanted to see us together in a frame, caught and held. And I trusted Willis’s perspective far more than Michael’s; whatever version of ourselves he offered us, however awkward and imperfect, I knew it wouldn’t be manipulated to serve another purpose. Willis was a brilliant artist but his muteness kept him from offering us any direction. We sat on Lana’s turquoise fainting couch, Rodney’s arm slung over the back. I put my head on his shoulder and we both smiled widely. We held the pose for about fifteen seconds. There was no click, no flash, just Willis’s tongue searching out the edges of his lips as he peered at us and then back at his page. I crossed my legs and uncrossed them. Thought about the bodily fluids that had likely permeated the fabric below me. I’d taken my hair down for the picture; it came to my shoulders now since Lana hadn’t been around to trim it for me. I checked for split ends. Opened my notebook to the back and wrote curling iron, hot rollers, hair dryer. Rodney bit at his cuticles, rubbed a patch of hair he’d cut shorter than the rest. Then he started slowly sneaking his hand behind my back and down the waist of my pants.
In the final image we look slouched. Our knees are huge. My head is on his shoulder but my gaze is turned down to where I study a splayed-out portion of my own hair on his green vest. Rodney is looking over my head, at something in the distance (as though there were a distance to examine in that space). From the way his head is turned the branch is invisible; each time I examine the picture, even now, I feel like I’m looking at a different version of him. His right arm, thrown over the back of the couch, is easy, loose. His left hand, on the sofa beside him, is balled into a fist. I tucked the drawing inside the plastic sleeve of a three-ring binder and propped it up on a table in my room.
But Willis didn’t just draw our portraits, he also unfolded his crumpled representations of the rest of the world. Unlike Michael’s well-ordered library, Willis kept his drawings in a decapitated plastic snowman lawn ornament, each image crumpled into the smallest possible ball. By the time he got around to opening them, some were smudged beyond recognition. And he wasn’t possessive about the drawings, the way Michael was about his writings. While Willis was in Zion he left the snowman on a table in the Center. No matter how much we asked about the drawings, he wouldn’t offer context. It was just glimpses: a water park with a half-finished (or half-disappeared?) slide hanging open in the air, a row of evergreens, an army barracks with a smudged face in each window, a plate with bits of unrecognizable food, a skyline, a beetle on a CD case.
On the fifth evening of Willis’s visit, Rodney and I sat uncrumpling the drawings while Talia hovered nearby, offering tea. I spread out a large sheet of paper. On one side, a flyer posted information about a spaghetti dinner to benefit Luke Owens, a five-year-old with a heart defect. On the other side, Willis had divided the paper into four sections, like a window. In the upper left portion a few men perched on an outcropping of rock. Something about their positions was strange; they were in a state of repose, somehow too relaxed for the wilderness that surrounded them. Stalactites hung from the upper edge of the right quadrant. In the lower left a woman stood behind a low fence; Willis had swirled wisps of hair around her head so that she looked like a dandelion gone to seed. Beside her in the lower right frame was a woman I first assumed was supposed to be a younger version of the woman to the left. This woman was also behind a barrier, but she had one hand out to steady herself while the other lifted her right leg up and toward her face. Atop the open scissors of her body, her face was turned away from the viewer, but along the back of her head Willis had noted, with a few deft crosses of his pencil, a braid that encircled her head like a crown.
I tried to pull in breath but my throat had narrowed to the width of a thread. I tried to hold onto the edge of the table. I tried to say her name aloud.
CHAPTER NINE
What was incredibly and ridiculously obvious to me was not incredibly and ridiculously obvious to anyone else in Zion. Anyone else besides Chester, that is.
When everyone had gathered for the community meeting that night I stood before them all, shaking, feeling bad I had to present the news to those who hadn’t seen the image yet. “Lana’s in the Zoo. She’s there against her will. We have to get her.” I paused between each of these revelations, making eye contact with each person in the room who would look at me.
Asher took off his hat and frothed his red hair. Tipped back in his chair. Didn’t say anything. Ida gave me a half-smile and nodded encouragingly, as though I had a more complicated argument to present. Talia was busy watching everyone else, trying to weigh the feeling in the room so she could decide how to feel.
“Did Willis tell you this?” Zephyr asked finally.
“No. Not with words. In the picture.” The picture was already circulating. Watching people put their fingers near the image of Lana, touch the outline of her form, made me want to vomit.
Zephyr cleared his throat. “I’ll give you that it sure looks a lot like Lana, but how do we know it’s really her?”
Tenzin, usually quiet, placed his elbows on his knees and looked up at me gently. “And how do we know she wants to be rescued, Mira?”
Paloma, who had the picture on her lap, added, “She doesn’t exactly look unhappy.”
“She’s not happy.” I was crying now in front of all of them, something I’d never done before. “She said she’d be back. She said she’d be back in time.” Even as I said the words, I could see myself the way they saw me: a hormonal pregnant woman. They nodded, friends who knew the truth but couldn’t quite bring themselves to say it.
“Mir,” said Asher finally, “she chose to leave. We have a rule about this. Remember? We don’t go looking.”
Then there was quiet again. The sound of me sobbing and no one quite willing to call the meeting off. They waited patiently for me to give in, to adjourn, to admit my insanity. They were trying to give me the dignity of doing it myself.
“I’ll go.” It was Chester. The first two words he’d spoken in public since the Rending. He didn’t repeat himself and he didn’t elaborate. I stopped crying.
“I’ll go too,” said Ida with a sigh, like she was volunteering to make the cranberries for Thanksgiving dinner. “I want to know what it’s like to be a Watcher.” She winked at me.
I looked at Rodney then: arms crossed, the branch on his jaw fuzzed beneath a week’s worth of stubble. He nodded his assent at me but he didn’t speak. He nodded but I’m not sure everyone saw.
“Fine,” said Sylvia suddenly, hands folded primly in her lap.
“You can’t go,” said Zephyr.
“I can’t?” said Sylvia, swiveling her head to face him.
“Especially not if Ida’s going. You’re our medical care.”
“I think you can handle the sprains and splinters for a couple of weeks. Mira is the only one pregnant right now. She’s the one at greatest risk. If she goes it’s my duty to go.”
Her logic made me feel deeply stupid for not thinking of it myself.
Suddenly there was the reverberating tinny ache of the gong. Talia held the mallet a little sheepishly. “That was the sound of me saying I’ll go too.”
There were two routes to the Zoo. The first was via the I-35 corridor, the road most itinerants traveled, where every few miles one could barter for shelter, food, and water. But more travelers meant more of the kind who marauded their way through the remnants of civilization by taking what they needed from others. Sometimes the marauders left bodies behind, violated beyond what was necessary to procure the kettle of stew, the jar of artichoke hearts in oil. Travelers on 35 kept some food easily accessible and the rest squirreled away in the linings of cloaks, the double bottoms of bags.
Given that we hadn’t heard of pregnancies outside of Zion we didn’t know how strangers would react to my visibly pregnant belly, so we opted to travel north up Highway 77 instead, a road that ran parallel to 35 but provided none of the way stations; as a result, our journey consisted of long stretches of boredom interrupted by pangs of fear. The people who chose to travel 77 did so because they didn’t want conversation or help, because they wanted to escape notice and, in many cases, weren’t afraid to protect their anonymity.
I resolved to collect items for my own Nest as we traveled, filling in the gaps of time, the stretches of anxiety as we moved into the unknown, by looking for objects that might provide a resting place for my Baby. Looking for objects for the Nest also kept my eyes closer to the road, stopped me from scanning the horizon and wondering if the next approaching traveler might want to do us harm. Unfortunately, Talia caught on and fluttered around me like an amicable bat, picking up an empty Mars bar wrapper, the jellyfished cowl of a plastic bag, a hair rubber band affixed with a turquoise star. “How about this, Mira? Something about this feels right to me.” Mostly, I ignored her.
We knew the walk would take us five days or so. We didn’t hurry ourselves because, though we were determined not to wallow passively in Zion, none of us was exactly eager to reach our destination. Sylvia and Ida collected leaves from unfamiliar plants, tucking them inside French Cooking in 60 Minutes or Less, a title no one had claimed from our bookshelf in the Center. Rodney and Chester walked faster, stopping at the remnants of buildings to kick through the detritus, to see if there was anything worth salvaging. Usually by the time the four of us caught up to them they were shaking their heads and moving on.
It was impossible those first few days not to think of our walk almost six years earlier: the raw blisters below Chester’s Birkenstocks, the anatomy flash cards Sylvia and Ida passed back and forth, Talia’s Costco-size jar of almonds, the curl of my own body against Rodney’s, how I’d feigned sleep just to be near his warmth and scent. Now I didn’t even notice his scent when I slept beside him, now I shifted often enough in my sleep, moving my belly from one side of the bed to the other, so that by the time I woke Rodney was often already awake and gone. We usually slept in my room since the ladder up to his was the kind of mild inconvenience that felt melodramatically large in my current state. I assumed he went back to his own room to sleep sometimes, too, but I didn’t ask. I was afraid that starting that conversation might lead to some truth about how he felt about my body or this pregnancy that, once spoken, could not be recalled.
I thought, too, about Lana. Somehow, of all of us, she’d always seemed the most ephemeral, the least practical. It was tempting, in Zion, where we needed everyone to be of use, to see Lana as superfluous, her dalliances and effervescence as
a waste of human muscle and problem solving. But now, in memory, her presence felt crucial, a levity and warmth and vulnerability that all of us needed; she wasn’t secretive about her weaknesses and we all gained confidence and strength from caring for her. I felt an overwhelming fondness for all the Zionites.
Then Sylvia bent to pull the leaf off of what looked like a fairly standard piece of clover and as her shirt rose in the back I noticed what looked like the beginning of a tattoo to the right of her spine, just above the band of her navy skirt. It looked like a disembodied tentacle, the gesture of an aquatic creature beckoning for something. And I wondered whether it had been there all along or whether this was something that had been done to her, that she’d asked to be done to her, since we arrived in Zion. Maybe it was only ink, like the ring Rodney had playfully sketched on my finger, but it looked permanent—though incomplete, interrupted. If it had been Ida I would have asked but I knew if Sylvia thought the tattoo was any of my business, she’d be the first to tell me.
Sylvia’s tattoo. Chester’s gun. My father’s bare feet on the warm shingles. My mother’s thumb on the edge of those vases. Behind all of these gestures might be stories I didn’t want to hear. Or maybe they were just gestures, empty of consequence beyond themselves. But sitting all those years in the front of my father’s church, coloring book spread across my knees, pressing crayon wax onto the faces of Abraham and Isaac or Adam and Eve, all that passive listening had prepared me to see everything as layered. Behind wine was blood, behind a broken body on a cross was unconditional forgiveness and love. Water might quench your thirst, but Jesus promised endless water of the spiritual variety. It wasn’t just the parables, which were supposed to have a lesson; it was every story in the Bible. Each needed to be decoded so the pew-bound could know how to behave. How to discipline their kids. Where to send their money. How often to turn a cheek. No matter how much my post-Rending consciousness denied the presence of God or affirmed the arbitrariness of Christianity, the truth was that my religion wasn’t just belief, it was the way I’d been trained to see the world.
The Rending and the Nest Page 16