She bit her bottom lip as she used her knife to split a branch I thought was already remarkably thin; it parted into symmetrical boughs. “My husband, Raphael, was this tireless community organizer, so beloved and charismatic. And that night he had my hair in his fist. I’d straightened it like those flat, clean floors and he accused me of trying to be a fancy white bitch. Of abandoning everything that was most important. Of selling out.”
“And then the Rending?” prompted Lana.
“Then the Rending.”
“Was he gone?”
“He wasn’t gone. I thought I’d just blacked out momentarily from fear or pain. He cut my hair—which I don’t actually remember that well. I do remember pawing through my daughter’s jewelry box for her dress-up rhinestone bobby pins. I remember spending another half hour twisting my hair up so that no one would know. And then we were driving through the streets and started noticing cars, empty and abandoned, and the awning missing from the corner mini-mart and the skyline different, too, though I don’t know if I knew that consciously. I remember saying that the world suddenly felt like an art installation.”
Ida and Cassie returned then and we helped them load more of the trimmed boughs into their sacks. Simone slogged over to the other side of the small pond, bundled some of the large dry sticks, and then dragged them into the water. When she had resituated herself on the bank she offered Lana and me a few stings from her pocket. We both declined but I felt the bitter threads of saliva fill my mouth anyway, Michael’s finger tracing its way from my breast to my thigh.
“I stayed with him. Raphael. For a year and a half after the Rending, I stayed with him because, you know, the familiar.”
I glanced at Lana but she didn’t look up.
“Raphael wasn’t violent. Not exactly. Just squeezing my arm too hard or yanking something away with too much force. Stupid little things: drinking the rest of the water when he knew I was thirsty or telling other travelers we met that I was on the rag if I hiked my voice above a whisper. Then we met Daisy and after only a couple hours she saw it. All these moments I thought were invisible. And she said why don’t you come with me? And I did. And there was this.” She raised her knife and the branch she was working with to encompass the whole area. “The Asylum.”
“The Asylum?” I repeated.
“Yep. No one pays attention to a crazy.” Simone’s voice took on the same singsong lilt that Abigail’s had earlier.
“What does that mean exactly?” asked Lana.
“It means that no one pays much attention to older women who seem a little batty. They’re not a threat. They’re not, as Daisy would say, ‘pluckable.’ Their information is suspect. They’re unlikely to have anything that anyone else might want. So Asylum. The place for crazies.”
“And safety. That kind of asylum too, right?”
“Yeah,” said Simone. “Most women don’t stay too long. Some, like Abigail and me, stay for months or years. And many who leave come back, bring us gifts, offerings. The waders we got from a woman who was here for a year named Sarah Ann. She was Sarah Ann because there was another Sarah here at the time. Ann wasn’t even really her middle name. Sometimes women come back and bring another woman who needs—this.”
“And Noons? Where did that come from?”
Simone shrugged. “Daisy. Who else. Because we’re nuns without the God part.” Simone rolled her eyes. “She wanted all of us to choose a saint name. Like the Benedictines. She chose Daisy and the rest of us refused. But if she calls you something random—Birch or Cardamom or Samosa—it’s a throwback to that idea. She still thinks it’s hilarious.”
Simone measured the bough she was working on against the perfectly slim and whittled branch she’d offered us as a prototype. She sliced off about an inch at both ends and with a few more swipes of her knife along the length the two boughs looked almost identical. The eight or ten branches Lana and I had worked on looked like they’d been mauled by a drunk beaver.
We were quiet for quite a while. Lana began to speak, picking up a dropped thread of conversation. “Michael was like that, too. I mean, seeing what I thought was invisible.” I looked up at her but both Lana and Simone just kept up the steady motion of knife against wood. “He was such a good listener. He is, I guess.”
I thought of his epic speeches punctuated with the gestures in the air, the way the Zionites had emerged from telling him their stories flushed and proud. I tried to imagine him truly listening to anyone in Zion now.
“He listened to my story,” Lana continued. “I hadn’t shared it with anyone, not entirely, since the Rending.” She looked at me and then peeled her eyes away. “It was so liberating. He said he saw my pain so clearly; my wounding was like a neon sign to him. He told me that pain is easily written but not so easily erased. ‘Look at your Baby,’ he said, ‘What must that mean? Maybe it means you haven’t moved beyond anything.’ He had ideas for healing, and dancing was one of them. I’d done ballet since I was three,” she explained to Simone. “And that actually did help a little. Then, this was at the Zoo, then he thought maybe a rocking chair would help, that the motion would unlock something. I don’t know.”
Lana set down the bough she’d been stripping and flexed her hands. Then she picked it up again and ran her thumb along the knots and fibers. “So for a while he had me going every day to his little room. You saw it, right, Mir? With the Barbie doll swinging from the ceiling?” I nodded. She sniffled a little and drew her sleeve across her nose. “I’d do my rocking therapy every day for an hour. Two? I don’t really know. Back and forth. Back and forth. I know it sounds crazy but he had this way of talking to me. He said, ‘I think you’re so much better than who they wanted you to be in Zion, Lana.’ ”
“Who we wanted you to be?” I broke in; but Simone looked at me and I closed my mouth.
“He’d say, ‘I see your real spirit and it’s trapped inside all this wounding and it’s such hard work to be free of it but you are doing such a good job.’ And he told me I could go. Every day. It was part of the ritual and he made a production out of it, out of actually opening the door and making the offer.” She gave a little scraping laugh. “Then he caught a cardinal.”
“From the feeder he had out there? Has out there,” I corrected myself.
She nodded. “He put it in a cage and didn’t feed it. He said it was part of the therapy. So I rocked and, day after day, watched it starve to death. When it died he wrapped it in a rag and had me hold it while I rocked.” She gave that barking laugh again. “It’s so absurd. I know. I thought of Deborah’s birds, of course. Then he took the cardinal away and had Horace come in.”
“Horace?”
“The man with the stalactites. Did you see him? So big and sweet and also hurt. You could see it behind his eyes. And Michael convinced him—I don’t know how—to—” Lana made a gesture toward her sweatshirt, her pants, “—on me. On my skin. And I was supposed to rub it in so I wouldn’t be afraid of what semen could do. ‘A healing balm’ were the words Michael used.” She wiped her hands on her pants as though that would erase the memory from her skin.
Then she walked down to the edge of the pond and raised her arms above her head and then let them float earthward. Folded her body in half and then raised it up halfway. Flat back. Then down again. Both Simone and I stopped to watch. It had been a long time since I’d seen Lana do yoga and her body was a perfect instrument. It felt like it belonged here; the lines she made with her arms, her legs, her back were an echo of the latticework of branches that curved around the place. Salutation finished, she took a deep breath but still didn’t turn to face us.
“And what happened was that I lost track of what I deserved. Did I deserve punishment or penance or humiliation? Did I deserve friendship or love or any kind of answer? Does any of us deserve anything after the Rending?” She turned around to face us, her face washed clean of everything besides her own truth, spoken plainly. “I think that since the Rending, since surviving, I haven’t b
een certain I deserve anything else. I’m still not sure. I feel ashamed that I’m here. That I even exist at all.
“Then Michael started to talk about you, Mira. That he had a feeling you were coming. How excited he was to have the opportunity to help my friend. Especially when you were so close to giving birth. And what I could see clearly was that you didn’t deserve whatever this was. So I didn’t turn, Mira. When you came to see me in the Zoo I didn’t turn. I thought maybe there was still time for you to walk out the door.”
That night, after another quiet dinner around the blue tarp, Lana climbed into one of the hanging baskets. I walked over and nudged the basket into motion gently.
“Is this more rocking therapy?” I could hear the strained smile inside her voice.
“No,” I said. “No more dead birds.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
Branch flexed against branch, a raw creaking. I wondered whether the wood was dry enough for a fire to start from the friction. Wondered, if the Asylum burned down, if the moss would remain.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I know,” she said.
“You deserve to feel safe, Lana.”
And then she finally started to cry.
CHAPTER SIX
Two days pressed into three and then four. A week passed and then another. I’d assumed our time at the Asylum would be brief. I’d assumed that Michael’s arrival in Zion would trigger a confrontation that in turn would decide everything quickly and entirely. In my most comforting—but highly cartoonish—fantasy Michael arrived in Zion, looked around behind cots and under the tables in the Center, and then threw up his hands in consternation. He then turned on his heel and departed, the Watchers trailing dutifully behind him. In my nightmares, Cal and Chester were stuck on top of Curly and Michael was pushing Rodney around in a wheelchair, soaking the bottom of the Pile with gasoline. My only comfort when I woke was that if something had gone wrong, truly wrong, I would know. Against all reason, I was certain of this.
Each day one of the elder Noons, Pearl or Daisy or Laurel, climbed to the top of Dumbbell, the Pile just to the north of the Asylum, to see if the red signal flag had been flown. Each day they returned with a few useless objects but not the news we longed to hear. All I wanted was to climb the Pile myself as though, from that height, I could will the red flag into existence. But the “pluckable” women had to stay inside. Pearl and Daisy and Laurel were the only women currently living at the Asylum who were old enough to fulfill Daisy’s notion of what a crazy looked like. The three of them left during the day, sometimes alone, sometimes together, pulling sleds or wagons or bumbling under backpacks that betrayed them as ridiculous, even from a distance. They returned with food and supplies most evenings, though occasionally they stayed out for a day or two or even longer if the encampment was distant.
“We only take the excess, dear,” Pearl told Talia one afternoon when she caught Talia’s expression of disdain. Pearl was pulling ghost fruit and a knotted bundle of shoelaces from a backpack. “And we even try to leave something behind. If we can. Your friend there,” and here she shook the bundle of shoelaces at me, “was quite thrilled with a bit of flexible tubing I left in a cookie jar a few years ago.” She smiled. Her eyes were almost Disney-caliber in their size but her cheeks hung down below her jawline like sacks of marbles. I remembered the tubing and also the slice of the knife in my palm. I wondered if she’d left the blade, too.
As time passed, we fell into rhythms, steady as the sweep of our knives down the length of the branches. I became accustomed to the soreness in my forearms, to the silence around the crinkling blue tarp in the evenings, to the sound of wood creaking as women turned in their sleep. The sound of the river, the loamy scent of the moss, even the poke of the glitter wand in my upper arm (or thigh or ass depending on who was wielding it). I learned to gut fish and to hang the meat on lines along the river to dry it. I braided Lana’s hair and watched as my hips shrunk back to their regular width and my breasts regained their normal heft. One night I even woke myself with my own groaning: The rocking motion of the basket had worked its way into my hips and Rodney was above me, inside me, throat flecked with whiskers, chest hair curled like fiddlehead ferns. When I woke I was ashamed of desiring him when I didn’t even know if he was alive.
Although I know she was also worried about Zion, Lana was happier than I’d ever seen her. Ever since our conversation at the holding pond, much of her effervescent airiness had returned. She went back to inserting yoga poses and dance steps into random conversations and she was full of good-natured banter and chitchat. But she also dedicated herself to the work, whatever it was, in a way that went beyond the debt we owed the Noons. I’m not sure if it was the moss and the branches, the company of the Noons, or simply the feeling of safety, but Lana thrived at the Asylum.
Meanwhile, I began to shrivel. And as much as I loved the safety, the delicate sprigs of moss, the latticework of branches, and the company of Simone and Daisy and Abigail and Cora and the other Noons, I hated being confined, hated feeling like I was living inside a chess game abandoned at its crisis. Strategy and loss and danger all cloaked in a frozen calm. And there was nothing I could do but wait.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Once we had accumulated enough branches, we began work in earnest on the boat pond, the only part of the Asylum property that wasn’t camouflaged from prying eyes. Although there was a row of birch trees to the east of the pond and the river to the west, the I-35 thruway was only a quarter mile beyond the river and there was little vegetation on either bank, leaving a view of the pond mostly unobstructed if a traveler happened to wander a little off course to camp or take a piss. One day, about three weeks after we arrived, Daisy accompanied Ida and Talia and Paloma and me to the pond, convinced that there was a high probability that we would mess up the construction if we went without her.
The Noons had a collection of cloaks, many in the style of cheap ponchos, stitched together from pieces of fabric that knit the wearer to the earth—browns and grays and greens with all the life sucked out. We all wore them, since this area was more exposed.
Ida and Talia and Paloma ferried themselves to the other side of the river to begin digging holes into which the major posts would be inserted. Daisy was “pretty sure they couldn’t fuck up a hole in the ground,” though her expression suggested that she remained doubtful. On the east side of the river, where the posts had already been established, she and I began affixing crosspieces to create a grid that would support the camouflaging branches.
Behind us in the pond bobbed our rafts and canoe and a paddleboat with a swan’s neck curving into half a graceful heart. A few sun-bleached life vests lay on the bank around the pond like mourners at a viewing. Oddly, we had never taken the Nests and Babies out of the vessels; they bobbed beneath the sky, just out of reach.
I held a smaller branch against a post where Daisy had chipped out a space for it. She had a rope made from rubber bands woven together three or four thick. Bim used to have a loom on which he’d make bracelets out of rubber bands. I’d scratched him across the cheek once when he stole the bands I used for my braces and made a necklace out of them.
“One of those yours?”
Daisy had never asked me a question and it took me a second to gauge what she was talking about.
“What? The Babies?”
“No, the fucking flamingos.”
“Oh. Yes.”
Her hands were surprisingly quick, wrapping the rubber-band rope under and around and through the cross the wood made.
“The blue vase,” I added.
“Is that why you’re still here? That vase have your number?”
I cleared my throat. “We’re here for safety, because of Michael and the Zoo. I thought that was clear.”
She shrugged. “Whatever you say, sugar.”
I stared at her but she kept busy with the rubber bands. I waited for her to say more. To explain herself. When
she didn’t—or wouldn’t—I finally spoke using my best I-am-annoyed-but-trying-to-contain-it-professionally voice: “Wait. I’m confused. Are you saying we’re being cowardly?” She kept winding the rubber rope. “I’ve wanted to leave. To climb the Pile. Dumbbell. You’re the one who wants us to stay hidden all day.”
“Huh,” she said.
“Am I lying?” I pressed.
“Not lying. Just choosing your story.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You were a mess when you got here. Probably still bleeding. Wavery inside. You needed this. I saw that. But I also see the story you’ve got inside your head now. And that story has to do with needing safety because you’re weak and powerless.”
“I don’t think that.”
“You do. Who knows what’s happening to your friends right now. Even your lover boy, the man with the tails.” She smiled, tongue placed in the empty notch, and made a little sucking sound. “A fine specimen.” She winked. “And the tails weren’t bad either. Did you see ’em? Over on the east side of the moss room. About yea high.” She paused in the wrapping to gesture to a place in the air at chin level. “It’s a compelling story, defeat is. And it will get here eventually, if you wait long enough. You’ll be a person who suffers defeat. Gracefully probably. That’s a good story to tell yourself. Plaster.”
“What?”
“On the rubber bands. Plaster.”
“Oh.” I unscrewed the peanut butter jar at my feet and dipped a knife into a concoction that looked like a combo of mud and grass and smelled vaguely of feces. I started to smear it on the rubber bands. Daisy walked off to the next post, whistling. I finished slathering and hurried after her.
“But this is your whole deal here,” I said, failing to keep the wheedling sound out of my voice.
“Hold it up,” she said. I dutifully lifted the branch and she reached into her back pocket and pulled out another sort of rope, this one fashioned out of scarves and rags and other strips of fabric. She began to wind it around the place where the post met the branch.
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