Wonders of the Invisible World

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “We have so thoroughly decimated the population of whales on this planet that only five percent remain alive.... More than thirty percent of the fish in every ocean...six million tons of fish per year...everywhere in the open sea we find oil, garbage, toxic chemicals...over one hundred million barrels of oil per year.... Heated wastewater from manufacturing processes provide false signals in the wrong season for spawning to begin.... Lobsters and catfish acquire a taste for oil.... Shorelines are dying.... Coral reefs are dying.... Over one thousand species since the century began....”

  Someone sat down beside me. I looked at the trail of smooth ivory hair over my hand. Sharon put her lips to my ear, whispered, “We were worried about you.”

  Her mouth lingered; I felt her breath. I stirred a little. No one else was in the room; the lecturer spoke grimly, her eyes wide, gazing at the empty chairs. If she spoke with enough passion, enough love, enough fear, people would materialize on them, begin to listen. Sharon rubbed my hand gently beneath her hair.

  “Come on.”

  I shook my head, stayed to the end. The lights went on. The lecturer rewound her video silently, collected her notes. I followed Sharon out. Everywhere in the vast and complex ship sailing to the end of the world, people congregated, talking, drinking, dancing, swimming, shopping, eating. Sharon led me up, continually up. I heard music at every turn of the stairs: rock bands, jazz bands, classical quartets, Christmas choirs, jukeboxes, waltzes, whale songs. I couldn’t see out anywhere. It was too dark. Or maybe the ship had sealed itself up because what was out there we didn’t want to see. We kept going up, passing elaborate rooms full of oak and gold leaf, decorated with enormous, beautiful, unreal trees, and gardens under glass. We walked on carpets an inch thick that changed colors like certain fish. After a while, I got used to Sharon’s slender, tense fingers holding mine. On every screen I glimpsed, whales surged upward blowing spume; seals clapped; penguins waddled; all the children of the sea played in the sea while we sailed serenely into the dark.

  A Gift To Be Simple

  I received the vision as I danced. I was the turning auger, the wheel spun around its center, the end of the circle moving to meet its beginning, to complete itself, without beginning and without end. I remember speaking of what I saw; sounds like shining gold bubbled up in me, floated out of my mouth. Across the room, in the light, I saw her, our divine Teacher, Mother Ann, the Word Incarnate, Daughter of God, in Whom He was well pleased. She smiled upon me, well pleased, and spoke. Yes, she said. Do this in memory of me.

  And I turned and I turned in the glory of her light.

  The next morning I was awakened before dawn, as always, by the rumbling motors of the delivery trucks in the A&P parking lot. The lot was on the other side of our pond and beyond the thicket of wood surrounding it, but I always heard them. I never minded waking then. The rest of the world was quiet, as it must have been in Mother Ann’s time over two centuries before. Darkness hid the malls and offices and houses; our community might have been surrounded by dreaming farms again, with only a sleepy cricket still singing, and a bird beginning to rustle in a tree. In those peaceful moments I thought about my vision, the way I thought about something made with my hands: testing the design I had chosen, the material, making sure they conformed, with proper strength and simplicity, to the purpose I had in mind. Before long our cocks cried awake the sun, and the cows in the barn, and the traffic on the thruway, which began its morning flood toward the city. The soft chime that Brother Michael had programmed into the system above our doorways sounded for morning prayer. Sister Lisa and Sister Tiffany stirred in their beds, yawned. We all got up silently, knelt in prayer in our nightgowns until the chime sounded again. Then we rose and bade each other good morning. We turned our backs to one another and dressed quickly, talking about the household chores and who would do what.

  “I need to change the oil in the truck this morning,” Sister Tiffany said. “Brother Greye wants to pick up lumber later on, for his chests.”

  “Then I’ll help him with the milking,” Sister Lisa said. I heard her snapping the bib onto her denim milking skirt. Turning, I saw her flex her knobbed, reddened hands experimentally, as if they were stiff.

  “I’ll do the beds,” I said. “And the dusting. And take the laundry down.” I opened a window wide to let the brisk autumn air in. The light was lovely, the color of old gold, from all the yellow yarrow and the dying leaves. Sister Lisa stepped to a mirror, began to pick her white braids apart. She grimaced once, absently, as at a sudden pain in a joint. I wondered if she saw herself anymore in the mirror; if any of us had seen ourselves for years. We were so used to our faces, we never saw the changes in them. There were no changes in our lives, so why should there be in our faces?

  “I’ll make bread this morning,” Sister Lisa said, “after milking and breakfast. I think Sister Jennifer wants to work in the wood shop all day.”

  I combed my own hair, a short and simple task. For some reason I remembered vividly what shade of red it had been when I was younger. I realized then how it had faded, day by day, year by year, since—when? When had it begun to turn? What year, what day had I begun to turn from young to old?

  Sister Tiffany grunted suddenly. A button popped out from under her hands, spun across the floor. She gazed at me, flushed and wide-eyed. “It wouldn’t close,” she said of her skirt band. I retrieved the button from under a chair.

  “I’ll mend it,” I promised. “Leave it here.”

  “But it won’t close. It must have shrunk.”

  “It’s all right. I can put a panel in it.”

  “A lot of things have been shrinking lately.”

  “Maybe it’s the laundry soap.”

  She gazed down at herself as she reached for a skirt with some give in the band. “Is it,” she asked with wonder, “what they mean by middle age?”

  We both looked at Sister Lisa, still so thin she wore the skirts and blouses of the adolescent girls we had cared for, before they left us. But her hair had no color left at all; it was ghostly white. Along the center of her head, where she had parted her hair in the same place every morning for decades, I could see her scalp.

  The discovery reinforced my vision, gave it purpose and intensity. “Yes,” I answered Sister Tiffany. “But it will be all right.”

  She blinked at me. “You mean my skirt.”

  “That, too.”

  We had had children, years earlier. In those years, we scarcely noticed our dwindling numbers. God would replenish them, we thought, for we had made the transition across the millennium, and had once again found our place in the world without sacrificing our beliefs. Our families had tried to escape it in earlier years, as Mother Ann had wished. But there was no place left unchanged, at peace, in this busy, noisy century. No matter where we went the world followed, leaving its huge dinosaur footprints: a shopping mall where we had last worshiped, a hotel where we had planted crops, a small airport in what had once been our apple orchards. The world shaped its houses with our circular saw, harrowed and threshed its vast fields with other designs, hung its clothes, pared its apples, and shelled its peas with our ideas. It would not leave us alone, and we could not survive the century without it. So, desperate, we had prayed and danced and sung, until it was revealed to us that if we could no longer separate ourselves from the world, we should transform it and make it our own.

  We began to patent all our inventions. We shared them, as we had always done, but no longer as freely. The money we earned with our discoveries and our designs, we used for the work that we had done since the beginning: sheltering and feeding the needy, the homeless. By the dawn of the millennium, we had 196 shelters all over the country, many of them run by those who had once been homeless. We could pay them well. Brother Brian had sold his unguent of beeswax and herbs to a pharmaceutical company; that had paid for all the land we now owned. Sister Jennifer’s designs for wood-handled flatware and carving knives had remodeled the first five battered old hotel
s we turned into shelters for the poor. Sister Tiffany’s hand-loomed weavings of carpets and quilts found their way into boutiques and major department stores. They bought our cars and trucks and kept them running. We built our own factory for packaging our seeds, and printed our own catalogues for seeds and furniture. Brother Michael, who loved animals, experimented with breeding, and produced a strain of sheep whose wool was multicolored and soft as silk. He told us what methods he used in breeding them, but I don’t think any of us quite understood that language. And I never thought of it again, until my vision.

  We had everything we wanted and we were dying.

  We had children, years earlier. Kyle and Carmela had come to us from the homeless shelter in the city near us. Megan had been left on our doorstep. Stephanie had run away from her parents, wearing nothing, in midwinter, but a thin dress and the burn marks on her arms. We took them in, fed them, taught them our ways. “Hands to work and hearts to God” as our precepts instructed us. “Excel in order, union and peace, and in good works. A place for everything and everything in its place.” So they learned to milk a cow, make a chair, mend a tool, to weave a hat to protect them in the garden, draw a perfect circle on the computer, print out a catalogue page, raise a chicken, roast it, and fire a platter to serve it on, then to wash the platter and put it in its place, all for the glory of God.

  They were good, dutiful, gifted children. When they became adults, we gave them the choice to stay with us or leave. They all left. They chose the world that Mother Ann had sheltered us against, and they did not return. We ran our shelters, our factories, our stores, with those who were honest and gifted, but who did not believe. For a while, we scarcely noticed. Others would come, we thought. Our faith could never die with us. Instead came the evening, after the meal had been cooked and eaten, the table cleared, the prayers spoken, and the permitted number of us had sat down to talk about the day, brothers and sisters separated and facing one another in our solid, worn rockers, when I saw with the sudden clarity of revelation how old we had all gotten.

  Brother Michael’s hair had turned completely white, the color, appropriately, of a fine sheepskin. Sister Tiffany’s bright cinnamon hair was shading into sage; her chipmunk’s face, with its big, inquisitive eyes, was lightly lined. Brother Bryan’s chestnut hair stubbornly refused to turn, though he had to reach back much farther to comb it now. Sister Jennifer, always thin and energetic, had grown pear-shaped in the past year; I could hear her wheeze as she climbed the stairs. Brother Greye, who had gone bald early, had grown a set of turkey-wattles under his chin. My own face, I noticed that morning, was beginning to resemble an apple that had sat too long in the bowl. Other members of the family, quietly busy in the house around us with late evening tasks, had also faded, the way dried flowers will grow pale, sitting for too many seasons in the light.

  There was no one else. A couple of families, one in California, one in Nebraska, had survived gracefully and successfully for nearly two decades into the new millennium. We received notice from our lawyers three years ago that the last of them had died, and that the check from the sale of the property would be in the mail. Even then, we did not worry. God the Father and Mother Ann would see to our future.

  It was revealed to me that night that I should worry. I brought up the subject at a tangent, as I squinted to thread my needle; I was cross-stitching a pattern for the seat of a chair. I wished aloud for younger eyes, quick, flexible fingers that never cramped.

  “We had them once,” Sister Tiffany said calmly. Children, or vision, I wasn’t sure which, until she added, “Everything fades. Maybe you need glasses, Sister Ann. I think I finally do.”

  “I think I need an apprentice,” I said. “Like Megan. Remember Megan?”

  “How could we forget her?” Sister Jennifer asked. “Such a sense of design she had. I used to drive her to the malls so she could study fashions. She could take the oddest pieces of clothing—a lime green shirt, a skirt made out of glitter—add a bit here, take away something there, sew the two together, and sell it for ten times what she paid for it.”

  “Such a sweet girl,” Sister Tiffany added. “But I don’t think she ever understood why we couldn’t let her wear what she made.”

  Brother Bryan murmured assent, rocking gently. “That must be why she left.”

  “And Kyle,” I persisted.

  “And Kyle,” Brother Michael echoed. “He had such a God-given gift for computer art. But what he wanted to use it for—”

  “Action comics,” Sister Jennifer said reminiscently.

  Brother Greye scratched a tufted eyebrow with his thumb. “I never understood what they are, exactly. So much color, so much violence. Children sit and look at these?”

  “It was most likely a passing fad,” Sister Jennifer guessed. “Though perhaps not for Kyle.”

  Kyle still wrote to us, now and then, from southern California, where, it seemed, he kept getting paid for his strange art. I stirred, anxious in spite of the peace of the house. They were the last we had cared for, and they were no longer children.

  “I think—” I began. But I did not know what to think, then, and Brother Greye was filled, suddenly, with the spirit.

  He said sonorously, “Everything must be done to perfect this world on earth, with perfect love, and in preparation for the Day of Judgment, which will close the perfect circle of our days. Of course we could not have encouraged Kyle, even to keep him with us. He made his choice. ‘Do all your work,’ Mother Ann taught us, ‘as though you had a thousand years to live, and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow.’ It is difficult for children to contemplate their death. They would rather read action comics.”

  “But Carmela,” Sister Tiffany remembered, “was different. She was not brilliant, but she did the things she could with a simple perfection. I really thought she might have wanted to stay with us.”

  Their voices were filled with the past, I thought; a comfortable past, not a threatening future. They added to one another’s memories of the children who had grown and gone; they found the flaws in faith that made them leave, but no terror in their absence. I said nothing more that night, but prayed and danced over my own fears, in our next evening service. Even dancing, I couldn’t transcend the world. It frightened me, how my heartbeat became tangled in the rhythms of Brother Greye’s heavy, clumsy tread; how I could not hear the familiar, bliss-filled conversations from the next world, only our thinning, wavering voices singing and chanting, like lonely children comforting themselves in the dark. Even that fear, I saw days later during our long Sunday service, was a gift. It led me to my vision.

  I saw as I turned and turned in the light of Mother Ann’s love, how God Himself had become human. He had come among us not through any human intercourse, as we were of course forbidden; not even by any human touch. He had made an announcement, and it became the Word. He had cloned Himself, using a pure, perfect, human tool. We also were known for the purity and perfection of our handiwork, and for our love of the best tools. We led our lives by His teachings, and by the example of our Mother, who had lost four infants before she understood that she was to be a vessel of God, and not of the whims of her own body. The vessel is filled; it does not fill itself. Emptied, it remains in perfect stillness and submission, waiting to be used. It does not use itself. So it was revealed to me, we would find the perfect tools, the flawless vessels for God’s Word, and fill them.

  I was moved to speak sometime later, after we had filled endless hot and steamy vessels full of the season’s pears, tomatoes, cucumbers, grapes, blueberries, cherries, and crabapples. In the fields, the cornstalks had been cut and mulched; the apples picked and stored; the potatoes and onions, squashes and peppers packed for market. We were all grateful, that evening, for our rockers. Outside, the cold rain tapped against the windows; a dark wind harvested the few leaves still clinging to the trees. How many more autumns would we all see, I wondered, before we wore our winter faces? Which of us would outlive the rest, to
die among strangers in an unfamiliar place?

  The distant sound of a jet coming in to land in the municipal airport inspired me; I found the place to begin. “Do you remember,” I asked the others, “when Orville and Wilbur Wright made their first flight—”

  “No,” Brother Michael said with some amusement. “We have a few gray hairs, but we can’t be that old, Sister Ann.”

  “We’re not that young, either,” I answered softly, and they were silent, wondering where I was taking them. “Anyway, do you remember the story of how our family in Ohio decided that since we had learned to master the automobile, we should buy an airplane? It was the newest and best tool, then. We have always loved the finest things.”

  “So,” Sister Tiffany said, pulling thread; she was quilting a case for her new bifocals. “Where does all this take us, Sister Ann—the Wright brothers and airplanes and the best of things? Do you think we need a private plane?”

  “No. I think we need children.”

  They were silent again. We could hear Sister Lisa above our heads, at the linen closet where she was mending seams and patching holes in our winter quilts and sheets. Brother Patrick was in the kitchen, tottering dangerously on a stool, sharpening knives. People who live together for decades grow to know each other’s voices and expressions, their thoughts, whether they want to or not. My brothers and sisters knew mine; they heard what had never been there before. Nobody bothered with words like adoption, homeless, celibacy, faith. We had adopted the homeless; they did not stay. We were forbidden by our faith to touch one another unless it was absolutely necessary. We were forbidden even to pet a cat. We were the last of our faith; we would die without heirs. Sister Jennifer, her rocker twitching a quick, agitated little rhythm under her, said simply,

  “How?”

  I leaned back, rocking myself now, in a slower, even measure, like a pendulum. I looked at Brother Michael again. “From airplanes to sheep,” I murmured. He blinked. “You told us how, once. Tell us again. How you did it with sheep, so that the strain was always pure, unchanging.”