The Rending and the Nest

by Kaethe Schwehn

  I had thought that when I got back to Zion there would be time for all the questions. But there wasn’t time. There was the press of the Watchers approaching; as Lana held my Baby I felt that press acutely, like a reminder of Chester’s gun digging into the small of my back. Now Michael had the gun and it was loaded and he wanted things we didn’t want to give him. Fear webbed its way across my skin.

  And then the humming began, the sound of Zion gathering. Chester and Rodney must have gone and woken them. The humming first and then the spots of light. Not like at night when the lanterns looked disembodied, detached from a human form. In the dawn the sparks of fire simply looked like a portent of what was to come, a reminder that no matter what we did, day would surely arrive.

  Ida came and put her arm around my waist, kissed my cheek. Talia scratched my back a little too vigorously. Asher sauntered over and rested his hands on my hips, squinted into my eyes. “You look good,” he said, his voice full of comfort rather than flirtation. Tenzin smiled sadly. Paloma nodded at me and swayed in place. Marjorie took my face in her hands. She smelled like ghost fruit and suntan lotion. Sven tipped his straw hat and winked. Cal strode over purposefully and lifted me off my feet in a hug. There were tears in his eyes when he put me down. Zephyr took my hand and squeezed it for a long time. All of them gathered around the pedestal.

  Here were all of the people I loved, and here also was all that I didn’t know about who they were. Here was the unknown. Here was the complexity of loving someone who has betrayed you. Here were people I loved who would both hurt me and love me, intentionally and unintentionally, again and again. Here was the far-off approach of people who were damaged, who thought violence might offer hope. Here was brokenness. Here was the After.

  All the while Lana held my Baby. To hold my Baby was comfort, an infusion of unconditional love, an all-access pass to the feathered metaphorical wings of the God my father had offered me, the God I was certain had abandoned me. All I wanted was my Baby and the safety of the old world thrumming through me. But to hold on to my Baby would also mean isolation. My body would be among these people but I would perpetually be elsewhere. I would exist in a world none of the people around me would have access to, I would live in an ocean of contentment they would not be able to touch. To hold on to my Baby forever would mean abandoning Lana and Rodney and Chester and Ida and Sylvia and Talia. It would mean abandoning the complex and broken world of the After to live in a place of contentment alone.

  “What do you want to sing, Mira?” Lana asked.

  “ ‘The Riddle Song,’ I think. Does anyone know that one?”

  “I do,” said Paloma. And because I couldn’t start the song, she did. The hesitant voices of the others rose up, slowly but surely, and found the tune. “A cherry when it’s blooming, it has no stone. A chicken when it’s pipping, it has no bone.” Paloma sang the words my father loved but the words were cloaked by the voices of those who loved me, imperfectly, now. “A baby when it’s sleeping, there’s no crying. And when I say I love you it has no end.”

  I looked around the circle of faces, at our wavering ring of light.

  I took my Baby from Lana and I laid her in the Nest.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Then Lana took me by the hand again. Her skin felt like gauze, like a Styrofoam communion wafer that’s supposed to be bread. Human touch was absurd after the rush and swell of my Baby against me. Lana took my hand and Kristen took the Nest and they led me toward the river. Had I been paying attention I would have registered the canvas duffel bag slung over Paloma’s shoulder and the briefcase of medical supplies in Sylvia’s hand. I would have noticed that the baby buggy Cal pushed was filled with ghost fruit and sweet potatoes and a container of smoked meat. But I didn’t think about it. I assumed it was part of a ritual I didn’t yet understand.

  We walked to the spot along the bank where Rodney and I had seen Deborah bathing more than a year earlier, the place I’d washed Lana’s hair, willing her sagging belly to reattach itself to her willowy frame. I touched my own belly, still swollen, misshapen.

  On the shrug of sand stood our canoe-mobile, its wheels now removed. Beside it bobbed three jerry-rigged rafts I’d never seen before. The vessels were loaded with supplies—and with the Nests and Babies. Paloma plowed through the water in her duct-taped Crocs and positioned herself on a milk crate at the back of the first raft; Talia joined her. Eleanor climbed onto the second and Cassie and Kristen helmed the third. Sylvia lifted her skirt and stepped delicately through water in her black boots to the canoe.

  “What is this?” I asked no one in particular.

  “This is a plan, Mir,” said Talia, not unkindly.

  “Spot for you right here, sweetie.” Ida stood beside the canoe, holding it steady. In the center, a few cushions and a blanket had been nested together in a way that was clearly supposed to look appealing.

  I looked at Chester, who seemed equally baffled and shrugged. Rodney was already thigh-deep in the water, checking the rafts for buoyancy or whatever word means not-likely-to-fall-apart-in-the-middle-of-a-river.

  “What is this?” I asked again. “We just got back. I don’t want to go.”

  “He wants the Babies, Mira. He probably wants the women of child-bearing age, too,” said Lana.

  “Michael,” I said, the word like a bird flung against a windowpane.

  Lana nodded.

  “And this …” I gestured at the vessels. “This is supposed to stop him? Running away?”

  “They’re well made. You did a good job,” said Rodney appreciatively, nodding at Tenzin and Asher and Cal.

  “Why wouldn’t we fight? Why wouldn’t we stay and fight?” But my body no longer had energy to put behind my questions. All the urgency in my voice had fled.

  “Mira,” said Paloma from her position on the raft, “you need to get into the canoe. They’re coming. We’ll talk later.”

  Lana took my face in her hands and looked in my eyes. I was reminded of the day she gave birth, only this time it was me with the heaving chest, me snorting breath through my nose like a horse. “I know you have no reason to trust me right now, Mira.” Her hands were cold but strong. “But this is happening. This is happening, Mira, and we have to go now. He is coming.” On the word he her eyes flashed in fear and I saw there was a story there. Things I didn’t know or understand.

  “OK,” I whispered back to her. But still I didn’t move.

  So Rodney waded through the water back to shore and scooped me up and carried me to the canoe. I didn’t fight. I felt the heavy weight of each of his steps through the murk of the river bottom. He deposited me gently and pulled a blanket around my shoulders. Then he kissed me. He smelled like Rodney and tasted like Rodney. I didn’t kiss him back but I didn’t pull away. I closed my eyes and there was that brief golden glow. A stooped sunset. Words rubbed soft as stone. It is like happiness, when we are happy.

  “I don’t know what this is yet, either,” he whispered, “but I trust them. I do.” The branch was glossy on his skin. “Be good,” he said. Maybe he said. The words came only half-loose from the back of his throat.

  Then he and Tenzin and Asher and Cal pushed us off that shrug of sand and my last glimpse of home was Rodney, chest-deep in the middle of the river, the current cutting paths around his skin.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The river flowed south at a manageable pace. Most of the time, people didn’t use the river as a conduit for travel because it made the traveler into an easy target, a sitting duck. One visitor had told us about an encampment in the south that set hooks and snares just below the waterline. “They were fishing for people,” he said, “fishers of men. Not what Jesus had in mind I don’t think.”

  The first hour or two all of the women were busy, maneuvering us away from fallen logs and snaggle-toothed rocks. The minute we caught (or seemed to catch) on a sandbar there were shouts about who should get out to push while poles and oars were used to gain purchase an
d leverage. Floating gently was not sufficient, we needed to be moving forward with purpose. I didn’t try to help. I barely watched. I was still wearing the pants and shirt Rodney and Chester had held out for me in the Barnes and Noble parking lot. Two days ago? Three? The shirt was red and advertised a reindeer run, Rudolph’s nose disappearing against the flush of the background. A failure in advertising. Encasing my feet were hiking books with purple laces—which should have been practical but instead made me feel heavy and immobile. Over the red shirt, a wool sweater thick with the scent of alpaca oil. I touched my chest. Where was my notebook? Did Michael have it? I couldn’t remember, and my interest in the answer to the question waned just as quickly as the question had waxed. I watched the backs of Sylvia’s arms as she paddled in front of me; when she removed her cardigan I watched a slow bloom of sweat move from the small of her back upward along her spine. I watched the banks: matted grass and snarls of bramble. Sometimes the silver wink of a candy wrapper.

  I knew I should want answers. Where we were going, for starters. Or how the other Zionites, left behind, were supposed to fare against Michael and the Watchers. I should have asked about the fear in Lana’s eyes. Or why she hadn’t acknowledged me in the Zoo. Why she hadn’t told me about Rodney or the abortion. What she thought our Babies meant, if they were signs or warnings, absolutions or punishments. But even the huge, consuming desire to hold my Baby had passed. They’d put her on Paloma’s raft and now that she was snug and secure in her Nest the desire to hold her, to have her against me, had eased. I was unnecessary, a shell without sea sound. And I was so very tired of caring. I was so very tired, as if I’d come to the end of a marathon and been told it was a triathlon instead.

  Was I hopeless? That’s difficult to say. I think I simply didn’t know who I was anymore. When the Rending occurred I was seventeen, still toeing the ice of my identity, checking for soft spots, for bubbles and cracks and fissures. That’s what being a teenager often is: not so much asserting yourself as trying not to fall through the ice. But since the Rending I’d become a citizen of Zion, collector of objects and builder of Nests; I was Lana’s best friend and Rodney’s lover. For a few brief days I’d even been some fucked-up version of a mother.

  Now everything was different. The Piles were still there. So were Zion and Rodney and Lana. My Baby bobbed along merrily a few feet from where I sat cross-legged in the base of the canoe. But it all felt wilted and sullied and fetid. Nowhere at once.

  The Mira of a week and a half earlier would have been peppering Lana and Sylvia with questions, would have been consumed with worry about Chester and Rodney and those we’d left behind. But this woman in the canoe, the only thing familiar about her was the way she resembled my mother on the nights she fell away, glass of wine in one hand and the computer screen scrolling in front of her. That version of my mother stretched her arms down the length of my arms, coaxed the sky into coming down and spreading its gray foam in my brain.

  And so I watched the surface of the water for objects that might catch, claw, or destroy us. But I didn’t watch in fear; I watched in numb expectation.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Another hour passed. The next time we snagged on shallow ground, Paloma called out, “Food!” and instead of prying the vessels free, we passed provisions to one another, containers of turnip pottage. I ate enough that no one would confront me about not eating.

  We started up again but I didn’t offer to paddle. Lana and Sylvia settled into a rhythm, taking turns. On one of Sylvia’s turns, Lana began to speak from behind me.

  “We’re going to an encampment of women, Mira. They live down the river.”

  I had no desire to respond.

  “They call themselves Noons. One of the women was a visitor once. When Ida and Talia got back to Zion a week ago and told everyone about the—the situation at the Zoo, Paloma remembered this woman and she and Kristen went down there and I guess, you know, asked if we could stay. Booked us a reservation. Mud baths and hot-stone massages.”

  She paused and I could tell she was waiting for me to chime in or turn and roll my eyes, to acknowledge her forced attempt at humor in some small way. I stared at the purple laces in my boots. They weren’t entirely purple. There were black threads woven in, too.

  She sighed. “So the plan as I understand it is to camp out there until the Watchers get bored with Zion and depart. Then we head back to Zion. The Zionites will give us an all-clear signal. Something Tenzin and Asher worked out with Paloma. A red flag tied in a tree?” Even though my back was to her, I could see her waving her hand in the air to fan away the logistics. “I don’t really remember. Just that while they were talking I kept thinking about pirates. Anyway. We’ll see the all-clear signal, do an all-clear dance, and then go home. It will all be OK. You’ll see.”

  “Your turn,” said Sylvia. She rested the paddle across her knees. The leftover drops of water slid like loosed pearls back into the brown river. When Lana spoke again I could hear the effort of the paddle strokes in her voice.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Mir. You’re thinking that’s a shitty-ass plan. You’re thinking what if Michael sets up shop or what if he turns Zion into a pilgrimage site or what if there’s a skirmish, a small one but a few folks take a bullet. What if Zion becomes a little Zoo? What if the Watchers figure out where we’ve gone? Yadda yadda yadda. You think I don’t know what you’re thinking but I know what you’re thinking.”

  I felt a poke on my upper back to the left of my spine. I didn’t turn. She pressed the edge of the paddle against me again.

  “That’s fine. You know what? You can not talk as long as you want. You can ignore me. I get it. Tit for tat. I slept with your boyfriend before he was even your boyfriend. I didn’t tell you I had an abortion. I HAD AN ABORTION!” she shouted. “TA-DA!!!” Eleanor and Ida turned around briefly and then went back to paddling and steering. We were starting to drift to the right, toward a half-submerged log. Lana poked me again, harder, but still I didn’t turn. Sylvia started to paddle even though it wasn’t her turn yet. We narrowly missed the log.

  “And then. AND THEN. You come to rescue me and I won’t even participate. I’d been so good at being the flimsy princess. Or the prostitute. Though we didn’t use that word, did we? You didn’t call me the Whore of Zion. At least not to my face. And then I didn’t do the damsel in distress role right either. I couldn’t even let myself be rescued properly. I get it, Mira. I’m the fuckup and you’re the hero.” Then, more quietly: “I get it. I know how your brain works.”

  It was quiet then. I could feel the others purposely not looking in the direction of our canoe. Sylvia lifted her paddle out of the water and let us drift.

  When Lana spoke again her voice was a knot of tenderness and pain. “I love you, Mira. You know I do. But for all the complicated maps of objects in your head, you also have a pretty good ability to ignore things you don’t want to see.”

  Mira of a week earlier would have fought back, pleaded her point of view, prodded the empty spaces in Lana’s argument. But the Mira I was in that canoe let Lana tell me who I was: self-absorbed, self-righteous, blind. That version of myself felt just as true as any other.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Three hours later, as the sky began to dim, Paloma called out, “There!” Up ahead, the river curved to the west; on the right bank two saplings arced unnaturally toward the river like fishing poles heavy with trout. Paloma heaved herself over the side of the raft she was steering, the first in our flotilla. As water sloshed around her hips, she pulled the raft through sheer force of will toward the left bank. The other two rafts followed suit. A string of profanities from our canoe brought us within reaching distance of the rafts; Sylvia held out her paddle and Talia grabbed it and pulled us close.

  Somehow or other, we secured the flotilla to the bank, a bramble-covered bank that stretched fifty feet to the left and fifty feet to the right and twenty feet almost straight upward. Paloma called out a name—Maisy or Dana or Dai
sy, I couldn’t quite make it out—and a section of the branches, about ten feet above us, shifted slightly to reveal a face and an arm.

  “You and Perky walk the boats down to the launch,” said the face while the arm gestured to Paloma and Kristen. “The rest of you come up here.”

  Paloma and Kristen (who admittedly was on the annoying side of attentive some of the time) began to guide our vessels along the bank, using a dim, muddy path; the rest of us clambered our way to the opening in the undergrowth.

  When I finally reached the opening I saw that behind the hole the bank leveled out; the branches that stretched ten feet farther above me weren’t growing out of the riverbank, they’d been constructed purposely to give the appearance of insurmountability. I slithered through the cackle of branches and onto a bed of moss.

  Moss. Green ground alive and soft and growing. Rather than standing up I stayed on my knees, pressing my face to the floor like an animal rooting for a scent. Not just earth but green sparking newness. Spring. Clear and full. The scent of a billion plants manufacturing chlorophyll at once. The almost alien green of minuscule new leaves, taut with moisture.

  “Keep it moving,” said the voice, a voice with the subtlety of grinding machinery.

  I obeyed; stood and moved to the side. The moss was everywhere. A carpet stretching across a space the size of a gymnasium but shaped like a horseshoe. We were standing on the arch of land that tucked into the bend of the river. All around us, branches rose up, woven into a crosshatched covering. Only the center of the room was completely open to the sky, though the gray light worked its way in between the slats of the branches as well. Hanging from the walls of branches were what looked like huge baskets; scattered on the floor were a few pallets, also knit from strips of wood. Though the craftsmanship was impressive it was the moss that had all of us goggle-eyed and gulping. It was a patchwork carpet, forest green and lime green and fluorescent green and every Crayola green in between. Ida crouched down like a kid playing marbles, running her hands back and forth over the fuzzed green skin, tears sliding down her cheeks.