The Rending and the Nest

by Kaethe Schwehn

  “These are writings from the Furies,” said Michael. “I’m sure you’ve encountered them on the Tropics Trail, Mira.”

  I purposely hadn’t encountered them because I remembered Michael’s story about them. I didn’t want to watch.

  “Oakley numbered the papers ahead of time,” Michael continued, “and then had the Furies write a few words on the back of each sheet. Now she’s organized the pages again and we were just about to see what the words might reveal to us. Weren’t we, Oakley?”

  She nodded weakly, wiped the sleeve of her jogging suit across her nose. I could see the swaths along both forearms where the fabric was crusted, white and dry.

  “Let’s finish looking at this later today, OK, Oakley? We’ll leave the pages right here. Knight and Drake will make sure no one disturbs them. OK?” The tenderness in Michael’s voice felt genuine.

  Then it was his hand on my back again, those two places on my spine. And this time in the midst of feeling disgusted and manipulated there was a tiny part of me that felt glad for touch from someone else, felt glad to have someone direct my path, someone for whom the way through this particular world was clear. The world Michael moved through was a dot-to-dot. There was an image on the page and figuring out the image was as easy as moving a pencil from 14 to 15 to 16. My life felt more like pointillism gone wrong. Dots scattered and layered to form recognizable images but only when you stepped away, only after a long time. Or maybe all those dots formed nothing at all.

  Michael guided me out of Discovery Bay and back to the room I’d found him in when we’d first arrived. The desk with the typewriter had been moved against the wall. Below the dangling dream catchers and trinkets and inked Barbie doll, the wicker rocking chair sat beside a lawn chair, its crosshatched mouth open to the view of the brackish pond. We sat.

  The armrests of my lawn chair had been white at some point but dirt or mold had worked its way into the pattern imprinted on the plastic. I busied myself trying to clean the grime out with my thumbnail.

  Michael crossed his legs and rattled the stings in his pockets. “I imagine you are eager to depart with Lana.”

  “Yes,” I said simply.

  “I’m fond of Lana,” he said, rocking back and forth gently.

  “You love her,” I reminded him drily.

  “Yes,” he said, nodding. “I do.”

  “I love her too,” I said. I was embarrassed at how thick my voice sounded, how easily the tears came. On the other side of the blur, a red flare. A cardinal, ten feet away from us, happily pecking at something.

  “I’ve got a feeder tucked in there,” said Michael.

  “You watch the birds? For pleasure?”

  “I do.”

  “I thought your pleasure came from other things.”

  “What kind of a person do you think I am, Mira?”

  It took every ounce of self-control I possessed not to say “sociopath.” I let the question hang between us and focused on the armrests instead.

  Eventually, Michael took his hands out of his pockets and held them out in front of himself. He stretched his fingers out, two pulsing stars, but they didn’t entirely straighten. When he tried to relax them they didn’t loosen either; instead, the fingers curled back toward his palms, searching for an offering.

  “What’s wrong with your hands?” I asked.

  “Rheumatoid arthritis,” he said, “treatable with medication but often debilitating without it. No new diseases since the Rending, I’m sure you’ve noticed, but some of us can’t shake the old ones.” Then he stuffed his hands in his pockets again and looked at me directly. “I’m not forcing anyone to be here.”

  “So you say.”

  “Hope isn’t a thing with feathers, Mira. Hope is a thing you manufacture. The Zoo is my way of manufacturing hope.”

  “Hope?” I thought of Oakley, her arms crusted with snot, of Knight and Drake, of the woman curled into the tortoise enclosure. “Then let Lana go,” I said.

  “I have a responsibility to these people, Mira. Davis is pretty certain he’s on the cusp of a discovery with Lana. Have you noticed the extra bounce in his step? It would be unkind of me to withhold that particular hope from him.”

  “So you’d keep Lana in a pen so Davis can experience some fucked-up sense of hope.”

  “I’m not keeping her. Remember. She likes to dance.” His voice had an edge.

  “I know she likes to dance. But you’ve messed with her head somehow. She’s not right.”

  “I gave her an audience. And a purpose. Some people would see that as kindness.”

  “She needs to go. She’s going to go. She’s coming with us.”

  “Didn’t go so well last time you tried to convince her of that.”

  “Let her go.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “You know exactly what I mean. Say whatever it is you need to say. Unlock her brain.”

  “Unlock her brain?” He threw back his head and laughed, a clapping bark. When he was done he left his head tilted backward, gazing at the floating objects above him. “Unlock her brain,” he repeated. “That’s rather marvelous. I like that.” He reached up and batted the Barbie doll. She sailed through the air like a trapeze artist in a murder-victim circus. We both watched until she slowed and then stopped. Michael stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Unfortunately, Lana’s really the most compelling Inhabitant I have right now.” He turned and looked at me fully then. Rattled the contents of his pockets so loudly I could almost feel a hard sting dissolving into threads of bitterness on my tongue.

  And then I understood: he wanted me. I was the real freak show, the one about to give birth. And whether it was a squalling baby or a teacup that came out of me it didn’t matter. Both would be exotic, both could be trembled and turned in the minds of these people until my Baby became hope and sign and signal. But Michael was smart so he’d been biding his time, waiting for me to offer myself.

  He smiled when he saw the realization cross my face. “Aha! There it is. I knew you wouldn’t disappoint, Mira.” And then he reached across the space between us and with his stiffened index finger he traced a line: temple to cheek to neck to breast to belly. At the base of my belly he stopped. Pressed his finger into the crease of my thigh, all the while never breaking my gaze.

  I held his gaze and I did not shrink back from his touch. One of the proudest moments of my life is not shrinking back from that touch.

  It was only when he drew his hand away that I said, “OK. You can have me instead.”

  He lifted his hands to his mouth in mock surprise. “I was expecting a bit more anger and tearful deliberation. You continue to surprise me, Mira.”

  I was tired. So very tired. And Talia was right. We needed a plan.

  My body for Lana’s body. That was a kind of plan.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I had offered up my body for Lana’s body because I loved Lana but also because I was overwhelmed by Michael’s creepy intensity and Rodney’s emotional absence and my own failure to devise a rescue plan. The gesture of martyrdom felt right and heroic but in truth I hadn’t thought I’d need to go through with it. I thought the idea would be so appalling to the others that another plan would be brainstormed, devised, implemented. They were appalled that I’d said “yes” to Michael’s idea but they were not, in fact, appalled enough to invent another option. It would be easy to free me, they conceded, if I was in on the plan. Inhabitants, after all, were free to go. Sylvia would insist on staying as my midwife—it would look strange if she didn’t—meanwhile, Ida and Talia would return to Zion and find a different place to house the Babies. The Nesting Facility would be turned into something innocuous. If the Watchers followed them to Zion, there’d be nothing to see. We’d turn Michael into a liar.

  Rodney and Chester and Lana would stay while I was becoming established as an Inhabitant. Within twenty-four hours of being placed in the Komodo dragon enclosure I’d fake some labor pains, Sylvia would fake co
ncern, and I’d be transported to their clinic. From there it would be easy to slip away. We assured each other that from there it would be easy to slip away. I nodded from time to time but mostly I didn’t speak. All this needed to happen soon, before I went into labor. Obviously. Obviously. Then Ida and Talia were kissing me on the cheek and stuffing blankets and food into bags and they were gone in what seemed like minutes. It might have been hours or days. I can’t remember.

  Trauma returns to us in snatches, in bright, painful bits that burn and die, the pop and fizz of orange flares against a starlit sky. The moments between are dark or blurred.

  The next thing I remember it was twilight and Rodney was kneeling in front of me. I was sitting on a chair. I remember it as antique; turquoise cushions with a rhapsody of golden stitchwork, but this can’t be. Rodney was going to read to me from a sheet of paper. From sheets of paper. Like a bedtime story, I remember thinking fondly. But first he explained to me how he had come to acquire these papers. Some kind of subterfuge. His explanation was complicated and I wasn’t listening carefully because I knew I was going soon, to stand where Lana stood, and though I knew it would only be temporary, that I’d be rescued, still I couldn’t quite concentrate on what he was saying. A freezer chest. A lock. Sheaves and sheaves of paper. But he found it finally. “I found it,” he said, “and I need to read it to you”; and I remember thinking reed not read because his voice was coming through like that, thin and wooden, and then he began to read and that’s when I began to listen. That’s when everything swerved into sharp focus, words and images lined up on the inside of my brain.

  And the story he read to me went lilting along in Michael’s words like this:

  “Once upon a time Lana was a dancer and she practiced in a studio that smelled of wax and oranges. And beside the studio (housed rather unromantically in a strip mall), workers were turning a Verizon store into a nail salon. The dancers liked to whine about the noise on the other side of the wall while they bit off long stretches of athletic tape with their teeth and they liked to eye the men when they smoked after their classes; the curves on the biceps of the men looked like they’d line up so perfectly with the swell of the dancers’ own calves. And there was one worker who was younger, who wasn’t there every day, whose eyes looked less dull, as though there were something he could see on a horizon, somewhere he wanted to arrive. Lana offered this worker a cigarette and he accepted and eventually he asked if she wanted to go for a drive and she said yes. He took her to an empty quarry and showed her how you could roll bits of junk from the top down that incline, and the sound that it could make, and he smoked and laughed while the dust rose up over her flip-flops, over her gnarled toes, over the gray shorts she wore pulled low over her almost nonexistent hips. Another time he took her to a field of corn out beyond all the suburbs where a farmhouse had been uprooted, moved completely, and they stared into the hole in the ground, the empty foundation, at the washer and dryer and roll of insulation and plastic dinosaur and exercise bike. The blaring horn of sun quieted behind the corn and out came the fireflies and they lay down together in the back of his truck. The sex wasn’t beautiful because he was nervous and a virgin and so finished too quickly and she didn’t seem as reverent as he’d expected and the next day and the day after the pull between them was gone, just wasn’t there like it had been, and he timed his breaks differently and she tried to ignore the sound of sinks being installed on the other side of the barre. And it wasn’t really hard to ignore. It was easy enough. And all would have gone on just as before except—because all good stories have an ‘except’—except she was pregnant. That age-old twist. And he didn’t want her to get rid of the baby and she wanted to get rid of the embryo. He called it a baby. She called it an embryo. She couldn’t be a dancer if she had a baby so she had an abortion. He wouldn’t go with her but they met at a café in the mall afterward so that she could say that it was done, so that they could part amicably, so that he could give her one last dry kiss on the cheek. Right as the Rending happened. Wouldn’t you know. Everyone you care about gone except for the one person you were just saying good-bye to forever. And then how do you say good-bye to that person, the only one that holds the thinnest thread of your past?

  “And then up walks a girl in a lopsided scarf, her cheeks dirty with mascara and a sweaty security guard holding her too hard on the upper arm. Her jeans are a little too tight on her curvy frame and her hair looks like it would be gorgeous if she’d just let it down. She looks like she’s busy trying to hide some parts of herself and trying to flaunt other parts and on top of all of that she looks pissed and terrified.”

  Then the story shifted away from Michael’s telling and into a direct transcription of Lana’s telling: “And I think we both just loved Mira, right away. Rodney and I did. She looked as broken as we felt and she also looked like she knew how to put herself back together. And we never told her. The Rending, when it happened, was the best chance not to say anything you didn’t want to say. And by the time I wanted to tell her it had been too long. And by the time the Baby was born, my Baby—how to explain what I thought it might have meant? I couldn’t.”

  When he finished reading Lana’s story I took his face in my hands. He had shaved, finally, and I was pleased about this. I kept running my thumb over the branch on his jaw. The three tiny buds near the edge of his lip. His eyebrows. His cheekbones. I remember holding each of his earlobes between my thumb and forefinger and feeling embarrassed that I’d never noticed the bump of tissue in the right lobe before. I don’t remember any people on the hill below us. I don’t remember Sylvia or Chester. Only Rodney. Around us, on the ground, were the pages.

  “You don’t have to do this, Mira,” Rodney said and I said, “Yes I do,” though I didn’t believe that. Only that there was nothing else left to do. My father used to say that the moment with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, hours before his crucifixion, his grief and prayers and fear, the purpose of that scene is to show Jesus as human. But now I realize that moment is when he realizes he can’t go back, can’t get off the ride. The story is stronger than he is.

  Rodney’s jaw. His ears. The purple stains below his eyes. His eyes that finally, finally met mine. “I love you,” he said. And I knew that he was being truthful.

  “I love you,” I said, and he was crying because I was saying the words with the sound of good-bye inside them.

  I remember this moment: his face in my hands.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The next thing I remember is being watched.

  Michael followed up on his promise, and Lana was released. I’d imagined taking her place exactly, precisely, amid the swirled and divoted sand. I’d nestle to sleep where she nestled to sleep, I’d add misshapen water bottles to her row of misshapen water bottles. But I was put in the empty dolphin aquarium instead. Knight and Drake lowered me down in the dog kennel I’d seen them tinkering with a week earlier.

  Was put in. I say it as though I had no agency, no volition. I was playing a role: Willing Participant, Happy Inhabitant. Or maybe it was that I was already turning inward, already feeling the first tightenings, from my lower back around my waist. Either way, I knew as soon as I reached the bottom of that empty tank that there would be no sauntering out arm in arm with Sylvia and my feigned labor pains. I had to hope that Rodney and Sylvia and Chester would find another way.

  In the hours before I recognized my contractions for what they were I remember being watched. The aquarium was no longer completely empty; it now looked like the set of a low-budget play. A burgundy recliner had been positioned next to a pink circular rug with elephants parading around the perimeter. From two tires filled with cement sprang two metal poles, a hammock slung between them. Wrapped into the cocoon of the hammock was a plastic ball the size of a grapefruit, Disney princesses posed coyly around the perimeter. At the top of one pole a net-less basketball hoop, a poor man’s eclipse. I raised my hand to write eclipse and tiara in my notebook but my notebook was gon
e. When had they taken my notebook? I hated the idea of Michael leafing through it, finding Zion’s practical needs beside my own list of desires. Words that betrayed my ache for the Before, for a way back.

  I spent what felt like hours shooting the ball: from the hammock, the floor, the chair. I tried to move the chair to a more favorable angle and received a banging warning from the Watchers on the other side of the glass. I was pregnant so I was not to move heavy objects. I gave them the finger and pushed harder. Then there was a tightening ache that made me release my grip on the chair and slide to the concrete behind it so that for a moment their view of me would be blocked. Until I realized they were above me, too. The actual aquarium stadium seats didn’t permit the Watchers to see into the depths of the whitewashed pit so they sat along the edges, legs dangling, heels kicking the sides. A constant irregular pattering like drops scattered from a branch at the end of a storm. And above those legs, the familiar nothing of the sky. Margarine without color.

  I shot the ball until I noticed a few of the Watchers taking notes, carefully counting the number of times Tiana and Cinderella sliced through that circular wedge of air. Then I stopped abruptly and studied the ball; the row of tiny smiling faces and half-inch cinched waists filled me with histrionic fury.

  It took me a long time to figure out how to deflate the ball. It was a tough little fucker, but I did it. Then I put it in the green five-gallon bucket in the corner that had presumably been left for me as a toilet. I climbed into the hammock and fell asleep.

  But there was a moment—if I am honest with you, if I am honest with myself—sometime into the second or third hour of shooting when I enjoyed the watching. The woman with the low pigtails, the one who’d offered the oyster crackers, she was there. Forehead pressed to the glass. She’d nod whenever I made a shot. Nod when I didn’t. Either Knight or Drake was always watching from somewhere around the rim of the tank, their comings and goings marked by the scratch of their knives against the plaster. Mona with her neon visor, chewing the end of a straw. The man with the red beard, on his belly, arms dangling toward me as though I were offering warmth. Sometimes I thought I saw Sylvia; once Rodney—I can’t be certain. There were so many faces, static and in motion. I tried not to look at them but always they were looking at me. So many people, thinking I might have an answer. And maybe I did. It was intoxicating. To feel beloved, to be of use. Is this why Lana stayed?