And I realized, seeing Sylvia’s half-finished tattoo, that my refusal to ask her about it had nothing to do with her and everything to do with the fact that since the Rending, I hadn’t really wanted to see beyond the surface of the present. I loved Sylvia and Ida, Chester and Rodney and Lana. I even loved Talia. But I loved what I knew: the present-tense flesh-and-blood bodies that stood before me. I knew bits and pieces of their Before stories, but most of the time, I didn’t ask because thinking about my own past was a hedgehog in the brain. Needles of pain everywhere.
But how much of who we are now is bound up in who we have been?
Rodney, who had stopped to wait for me, took my hand. He didn’t look at me. He was busy scanning the Piles, the horizon, the periphery, his gaze positioned on everything I didn’t want to see.
Choosing to travel up 77 meant that after three days of crumpled cornfields spotted with the occasional Pile and a few farmsteads (one missing the roof of the barn and another the east-facing wall of the farmhouse), we came to the outskirts of suburbia, to the remains of Home Depot and Old Chicago, Wendy’s and Red Robin. We stopped to rest at a movie theater where rows of blue cushioned seats stood neat as soybeans in the open air. The six of us sat side by side, not speaking, staring at the place where the screen would have been. Instead we had the rise of a few naked trees and a sweep of horizon that we couldn’t bind into a fixed box. Saturated the night before, the warm earth steamed in a mellow haze near the ground, a blur below the sharp line where the knife-colored sky met the earth. The ground and sky were interrupted only by the trees and a red plow, its right side listing toward the ground.
“I like what the artist has done with the foreground,” said Chester.
“Yeah,” said Ida, nodding, “the use of such dull colors really brings that tractor thing into bright contrast.”
“It was painted during his postapocalyptic period,” I added.
“Looks more like his bored-as-fuck period,” said Rodney, flicking a blue pen cap at the nonexistent screen.
“Good use of line,” said Sylvia.
“Are we pretending this is a painting?” said Talia.
Chester rolled his eyes and offered his hand to me. I heaved my body up with a groan like a keeling ship.
Rodney and Sylvia headed to the Home Depot on the off chance something useful might remain; Chester, Ida, Talia, and I made our way to Barnes and Noble.
Dust was everywhere. Dirt skirted the corners of the windows. The tiled café floor and the silver counter were grimed with a sticky residue and coated with ash, the same ash that filled a metal garbage can. The ceiling darkly reflected someone’s attempts at heat.
Ida was the only one brave enough to enter the restrooms. They’d been used as such long after the toilets stopped functioning, as if whoever lived inside the store had been afraid to go outside or as if he or she couldn’t bear the thought of constructing a new system by which to live.
Most of the books were gone but a few sundry items remained: a cat calendar, a book on Roman mythology with the cover removed, Mortgages for Dummies. At the back of the store, below looming cutouts of Frog and Toad, Olivia the pig, and Alice in Wonderland, we found a pile of blankets, a row of planters filled with dirt. A few thin brown stalks wilted over the edges. At a child’s table a stuffed alligator sat on a chair; between its outstretched paws, a Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile book was open to a picture of an apartment building with a whirlwind of smoke emerging from an upper window. Facing the alligator, a row of Thomas the Tank Engine cars stood stiff as the Von Trapp children.
I remembered the feel of those small train wheels on my thigh while trying to read a Nancy Drew book on the couch. A crust of toast sat on a blue plate beside me. Chugging noises inside Bim’s mouth. How long did I let him play before I sighed him away, before I turned to curl on my other side, toppling the entire Thomas family to the depths of the carpet?
I was thankful that fluorescent lights weren’t possible, that the only way of seeing what remained was via the pale light bleeding through the floor-to-ceiling window. Taped to the window were a few bleached pages from a Richard Scarry book. Holding the swell of my belly with one hand I touched the specters of Lowly Worm and Huckle Cat. A pickle truck. A dog, ears whipping behind him with the speed of his motorcycle ride. Watermelons tumbling down a winding road. I dug the tips of my fingers into my belly. Nothing pressed back.
Though the books were gone, most of the shelves were cluttered with objects. It took us a few minutes to realize that someone had curated the objects based on the genre cards that remained. Below the Romance sign: an empty perfume bottle, the top of a lipstick tube, a tiny green plastic trident, the kind used to hold a greeting card in a bouquet of flowers.
In the Mystery/Thriller section: a red plastic magnifying glass that looked like a McDonald’s Happy Meal toy, a piece of yellow twine looped into the shape of a noose, a Polly Pocket doll lying on her back, her tiny plastic body outlined with chalk. The dum-dum of the Law and Order scene break chimed in my head.
In Biography/Memoir were faces—from photos, books, flyers. A teenage girl in a white sweater holding a flute and a poodle; a man with a beer belly and a red bandana wrapped around his forehead raising a walleye above his head; a middle-aged woman with owly glasses and a pixie cut half-smiling in front of a blue background studded with fake clouds. Some of the faces rested in frames, some were torn and taped to the back of the shelf, some were held in place by a makeshift weight, a few had drifted to the floor. Most of the shelves held faces.
More unbearable to me than these faces was the thought of a person or people moving through empty houses and apartments, choosing to keep or collect the one thing that the rest of us automatically passed over. I couldn’t decide whether this was creepy or beautiful.
The Self-Help section was small and less understandable. It consisted only of a wad of cotton balls, a single flip-flop with a rainbow strap, and a 4H trophy featuring a golden goat.
“It’s not that different from our Nesting Facility,” said Ida, touching the goat’s tiny tail.
“Except,” said Talia, “no Nests.”
“Maybe these are Babies,” I said.
Chester shook his head. “Too many. And plus, they left them behind.”
Did Lana miss her Baby? Was it easier for her to be away from it? Is that why she hadn’t come back to Zion? For the first time the possibility that perhaps she didn’t want to return coated my stomach like an oily sheen. The lurch I’d felt in my heart when I saw Willis’s drawing—I’d trusted that it was connected to Lana’s suffering but it suddenly dawned on me that perhaps the only suffering I’d ever understood was my own.
We waited for Sylvia and Rodney in the parking lot. Ida and Chester rifled through parked cars though we knew the chances of finding anything useful were slim. I sat on a curb, paging through a mildewed road atlas, roads and cities taken over by splotches of brown, names smudged beyond knowing. Talia stood in mountain pose, eyes closed, absentmindedly running the bristles of a snow scraper over her neck, down her left arm. Her half-smile caused a sudden rush of pity; I saw how much she was enjoying that touch, the sensation of something on her skin other than her own two hands.
“Anything?” I asked Rodney and Sylvia when they grew close enough to hear.
Rodney shook his head.
“People had been living there,” said Sylvia simply.
“Could you tell why they left?” asked Ida.
Sylvia shrugged. “No signs of struggle. Hunger maybe? Loneliness?”
“They didn’t leave anything valuable behind.” With that, Rodney turned and started walking again.
It’s not that we didn’t see other people. Two women I initially thought were mannequins watched us from inside an Arby’s, playing cards at a table just behind the empty window frame. One woman raised her hand as we passed, as if to show us her flush or full house, but she didn’t open her mouth and we didn’t either. In the lot of an old Shell station a man in a
huge navy sweatshirt stood poking at a fire on an aluminum sheet. Our view of his face was blocked by the hood, white drawstrings dangling like tusks. I wondered how he’d managed to keep them so clean. He didn’t look up, though he must have known we were there. At other times we were watched by people we never saw, but whose presence we registered nonetheless. Talia wanted to talk to everyone, of course, but Rodney and Chester and Sylvia were all adamant that we remain anonymous, neutral.
“Don’t you believe that people are really good at heart?” Talia asked plaintively.
“People might be good at heart, Anne Frank,” said Rodney, “but people also want things. And when you stop to talk to someone it’s easy to get messed up in their wanting.”
“Fine,” Talia said, crossing her arms over her chest, “but I think you are mistaken.”
To keep Talia from radiating her perpetual good cheer toward the women in the Arby’s, I asked her to sing a song, told her I needed a little pick-me-up. She immediately started in with “Eye of the Tiger,” a song to which she knew only two actual lines. Rodney and Chester, only a few steps ahead of us, quickened their pace. Sylvia and Ida grew suddenly interested in a vine of ivy twined around the Galaxie Avenue sign. Talia moved from “Eye of the Tiger” to “Holding Out for a Hero.” Up ahead, Rodney and Chester turned right, onto McAndrews Road. The Zoo was only a mile ahead.
“I keep thinking about that woman.” Talia stopped abruptly, both the walking and the singing. She’d been using the snow scraper as a walking stick; now she planted it in the cement beside her and turned it in little half-circles.
“What woman?”
“After the Rending. How I sat in that supply closet in the Zen Center. How she just kept crying.”
I touched her wrist. “I’m sorry that happened, Talia.”
“I’m just starting to feel really strongly that the Zoo is not a good place.”
I sighed and put my hands on my lower back to stretch. “Well, you’re probably right. It’s probably not such a great place.”
“Aren’t you afraid?”
I shrugged. “I’m trying not to think about it.”
“I think you need to think about it. I think we need a game plan.” I could hear the faint grind of the nub of the scraper against the concrete.
“I don’t have a plan exactly. I thought we’d wait and see.”
“Wait and see.” She stared at me; stepped closer. Tiny whiteheads framed each of her nostrils. Her dark eyelashes were short and her eyes were the kind of brown that in sunlight can appear golden. But there was no sunlight. “I thought you were brave. I came because I thought you were brave.” She let out a gulpy little laugh. “But you just don’t get it. You’ve always—you’ve always been safe.”
“Not always,” I said. I thought of the dead cat’s tongue, the cast-iron eyes of the visitor, of Doug pressing caramel corn into my mouth and Michael’s stunted teeth and the sound of Lana laughing after her Baby emerged. “I’ve been scared before, Talia.” But I had to look away from her in order to say so because I also knew that not all fears are equivalent, that her experience of terror was greater than mine. I stared to the left of her head, at the roof of a nondescript office building, the kind that would have housed an orthodontist or podiatrist in the Before.
“This is a long way to take us without a plan. This is a lot to ask of us without a plan.” She pushed her chin toward me and put her fists on her hips. The tiny bells on the hem of her skirt jingled emphatically.
I closed my eyes. The full force of the emptiness of our planet swept in: no whirring of humidifiers or air conditioners or generators, no rumble of vehicles over gravel or asphalt, no drone of airplanes arcing across the sky, no low buzz of fluorescent lights or neon signs, no clocks ticking forward or an automated voice telling you it was OK to cross the street. Though we sometimes heard the occasional animal sound from the few that remained (a rustle, a squeak, a chirrup), there was no uniform pulse of crickets, no chorus of somnambulant frogs. There was the sound of Talia’s breath, a slightly nasal wheezing, and the tinkle of her bells. More distantly, the sound of Rodney hacking mucus out of the back of his throat and Sylvia or Ida turning the pages of their book. But mostly, nothing. I opened my eyes.
“I don’t have a plan, Talia. You’re right. I should have a plan. I’m sorry.”
Talia relaxed her chin slightly and shifted her weight to one hip. “OK. But you need to think of something, Mira.”
“OK,” I said.
She picked up the scraper and for the first time since I’d met her, Talia walked away.
CHAPTER TEN
I wish I’d called Rodney and Chester back at that moment, wish I’d followed Talia’s advice, made us stay put until we had some kind of plan, until we had agreed upon a single story, a single explanation for why we were there. As it turned out, the only credential we needed was my belly.
Once we turned the corner onto McAndrews Road, we were no longer mostly alone in the world. McAndrews ran from the Zoo, about a mile down the road to the east, to the I-35 corridor, about a mile and a half to our west. And McAndrews was filled with people. At least, the couple dozen people we could see from where we stood made the road feel full. Most of the people were traveling in packs of two or three, though a few were solo. They still obeyed the driving rules of the Before: those headed toward the Zoo stayed on the right side of the median, those heading toward 35 stuck to the left. At first, no one paid much attention to us. But then the two men directly in front of us stopped briefly and as they did so one turned idly in our direction. He nudged his partner, who also turned. Neither moved.
We gained on them steadily. Fifty yards. Thirty yards. Rodney and Chester were still a bit in front of us so they must have been the first to see the knives hanging from the belts of the duo.
“Rodney!” Talia cooed lightly, jingling the bells of her skirt a little to try to get his attention.
“Rodney!” I hissed.
He and Chester turned. “It’s OK, Mir,” he said, “but you can stay there if you want.” Then he kept walking. Ida, who had caught up to Talia and me at that point, put her hand gently to the small of my back. “Come on, sweetie,” she said softly. I thought of Rodney’s same touch on the day we met, guiding me away from the security guard; I thought of the sharp punctuation of Lana’s elbows in the air as she made my first and last cappuccino.
Foam. Frothed milk. Shaving cream: I wrote the words in the back of my notebook as I walked, hands shaking, so I didn’t have to watch the knives grow bigger.
Chester was offering a fortune to one of the men when we caught up. Rodney had his head down and was smiling slightly as he listened to something the other man said. Each was a good foot shorter than Rodney or Chester with skin the color of freshly saturated earth. Their arms were short, made shorter by the way they held their shoulders high, almost to their ears. They introduced themselves as Knight and Drake in voices that sounded like swooping swallows; they spoke over and around one another, sometimes finishing one another’s sentences, sometimes leaving fragments of thoughts hovering in the air. Drake’s left eye was cloudy and wandered. Knight’s hair was shaved just as closely as Drake’s and was just as dark except for a streak of rust that ran from his left temple to the back of his neck. The right halves of their bodies were completely identical.
Both of Knight’s eyes and Drake’s right one were focused on my belly.
“Is it?” asked Drake.
“Is it a, you know?” added Knight.
I nodded. “It is,” I said.
“We’ll take you,” said Drake.
“You wanted the Zoo?” asked Knight.
“We can take you to the Zoo.”
“Is it the Zoo you wanted?”
“The Zoo is a place we can take you.”
I nodded. Knight took my right hand and Drake took my left. Their hands were small but warm and each exerted the same amount of pressure on my hand. I felt held but not suffocated. Though both Knight a
nd Drake were a good six inches shorter than I and though I’d known them for only three minutes I felt strangely protected.
A power-walking woman bypassed us on the right, then caught sight of my belly and slowed her pace. “I’m Mona,” she said, pointing to a piece of red electrical tape that functioned as a nametag on her pink athletic jacket. Even though she’d slowed her pace she still moved her arms with vicious pumping motions; her legs were bound and thickened by three or four pairs of gray exercise tights. “And you’re pregnant,” she said matter-of-factly.
“I’m Mira,” I said, “and yes, I’m pregnant.”
“I’m Talia!” piped up a voice behind me but Mona didn’t even glance back. She pointed to the underside of her visor to which she’d affixed a glaringly bright piece of yellow fabric. “If there’s no sun you bring the sun to you,” she said.
I nodded.
“Hi Knight. Hi Drake,” Mona puffed. Drake and Knight nodded without looking directly at Mona.
“I live with my sister in the Zoo,” said Mona, as though I’d asked her a question. “No, she’s not really my sister, she’s a second cousin. I met her at a barbecue. No, not after the Rending, before the Rending.” She stretched out the word “before” as though my intelligence were in question. “Someone’s anniversary or retirement. There was one of those ice cream cakes.” She suddenly tilted her head to the sky and yelled loudly, “ICE CREAM CAKES!” Then she looked at me again. “And everyone squeezed into a screened-in porch watching a rented white tent flap around in the rain. You don’t care about this,” she added matter-of-factly. “I’m not immune to social cues.”
The Rending and the Nest Page 17