“Who were they?”
“They were evasive when I asked their names. They asked me in.”
“Did you go?”
“Sure. They were extremely polite. I asked them if they were relatives, what they were doing in the house, and so on. They said that they were taking good care of the house for Sera and Glen until they got back. I asked from where and they got all concerned. Gooey sweet. They were very worried, they said, about the whereabouts of the Songmakers. They had just been going to ask if I knew where the Songmakers were. They were hoping that I had some information on them. I said no and they made a show of being very disappointed. Then they brought in a cake.”
“A cake?”
“A fresh lemon cake. It was very good.”
“You ate the cake?”
“I wanted to know what was happening. It was really like some kind of dream. They kept talking about your parents and how careful they were being with all of their things, how well they were taking care of the ‘beautiful Songmaker residence,’ and how if I should run into them by chance would I let them know that I had seen Glen and Sera and by the way, who was I? What was my relationship to the Songmaker family? How had I met them?”
“What did you say?”
“I used to work for them, a landscaper. I was concerned about their landscaping going to weeds.”
We stood together for a long while, quiet, just breathing. After a while I asked who was in charge. Phil said God. I said that was the most terrifying thing I’d ever heard and he said, “Yeah, me too. That’s why I bought the Bushmaster.”
August 30
Phil is hiding our little arsenal in the basement crawl space and late in the day I go down with him to look at what he has rounded up for our protection. He has laid them neatly on towels, the new ones with their owner’s manuals; he is learning to use each one, cleaning and loading them. There are five weapons. A Rossi handgun, a .38 special with a laser grip that beams a light on the person you’re going to kill so you won’t miss and they’ll have a red second’s warning they’re about to die. He’s got a beat-up 12-gauge pump-action shotgun with six boxes of bird shot and six boxes of deer slugs. Another black, evil-looking 12-gauge that’s the same as the other, only scarier. A high-tech-looking rifle that Phil taps and calls Bushmaster. There’s ammo for it, and last, weirdly, there is an ornamental Custer’s Last Stand Tribute Rifle. It’s in a case with a label on its side.
“Is this for real?”
“Open it.”
I lift the hinges on the case and there it is, cradled in green pseudo-suede.
“Where’d you get this?”
“Where I got ’em all. One of our fellow parishioners is a gun dealer. I bought it off him.”
I take out the rifle and hold it under the light. Both sides are heavily decorated—one has a thick-of-the-action-type engraving of the battle, plus portraits of George Armstrong Custer and his two brothers, Thomas and Boston. On the other side chiefs Gall, Low Dog, Sitting Bull, the Crow scout Curly, plus the only survivor of the Custer command, a gelding named Comanche, are carefully engraved and finished in what looks like real gold.
“I got it cheap because it’s a reproduction, a lever-action ’73 model Winchester. I mean, it works but it’s not that useful.”
“But wow.”
“But wow?”
“I’m having that kind of Old West–type feeling—I think I’m channeling my unknown maybe Lakota father—I could be related to the guys on the Indian-stock side of this gun, you know?”
No answer.
“So you got it for me?”
Phil shrugs. “I don’t know. It was there. He wanted me to have it.”
I put the rifle back in its special display case. Then I touch the barrel of the Bushmaster semiautomatic. Smooth as glass, and warm. It makes me want to puke all of a sudden. I’m in a knot, confused. I actually think I like the Custer’s Last Stand Tribute Rifle.
“Put them away, Phil,” I say. “Get rid of them. You took a vow to do no harm.” But it’s actually me I’m scared about.
He sits back. The guns are scattered between us. He draws a huge breath, holds it, and looks at me. His face twists and I can’t tell—tears? Sweat? A few drops leak down the sides of his cheeks. He blows his breath out fiercely, shakes his head, and keeps working.
August 31
We have decided that we need information as much as anything else, and that Phil will work at the church and return here secretly. If he cannot obtain gasoline to operate the car, it is a four-mile walk. But he finds right away that the city is adapting, the way all cities do. Although there are endless lines when anything from gas to butter appears, people have quickly organized. There are dates and times for everything to sell and trade, and neighborhood centers for information dispersal. There are already clandestine radio broadcasts and wildcat cable and some sketchy wireless internet connections, even a shadowy television signal. Phil brings an old TV and a radio over from the church basement and we check at odd hours—four and five a.m.
One pre-dawn, we see the image of Mother fading in and out. She looks haggard, much older, tinged with green like the head of the Wizard of Oz.
“I am back,” she says, glaring exhaustedly up from under her eyebrows. “They failed to destroy Mother. I will always be here for you.”
She licks her dry lips and whispers.
“I wonder if you have the courage to save the country we love. We need you to be a Patriot. We need you to volunteer. If you are a woman, if you are pregnant, go to any of our Future Home Reception Centers. WV. Our chefs are waiting for you!”
I slap the controls and turn to Phil.
“What was that? Volunteer for what?”
“You don’t want to hear,” he warns, as usual.
“Tell me.”
“It’s about frozen eggs and sperm. There are special centers.”
“With chefs?”
“And even better, actual food.”
“What’s this WV?”
“Womb Volunteers. Listen.”
On the radio someone describes a raid on an in-vitro clinic by members of some militant organization we’ve never heard of. They plan to use one thousand Womb Volunteers to gestate the embryos they’ve liberated from that clinic’s deep freeze. There is crackling. A sudden interruption and a young woman’s voice.
“We took the leftovers. The embryos not labeled Caucasian. We’re going to have them all and keep them all. We’re not killing any. All are sacred.”
The news report goes on, ducks are not ducks and chickens are not chickens, insects are nutritious, and there are ladybugs the size of cats.
September 1
Further description: My backyard’s unused rail spur has not yet been converted to bicycle trail. That in turn merges with an overgrown and half-abandoned shipping yard and several acres of city park that lead to a corridor of wildness, ravine, tangled groves of grapevine-throttled trees, and an abrupt drop down a steep bank to the soggy headlands of a serene, almost hidden lake. Because of the luck of this convergence, I have always seen an unusual number of birds and animals for a person who lives in the city. Now that I cannot go out of my house, I spend my time near the window most private, the lavish rectangle of glass that looks out into my backyard. I set up a desk underneath the window where I can write to you every day, and because I’m there so much, I see the birds that come to feed on the purple fruit of two large mulberry trees. I’ve often thought of cutting down these trees. They drop buckets of berries in the grass and all August the yard smells like wine. Now I’m glad I didn’t. Maybe next year, if there is one, I can dry the berries out. Maybe I can gather them at night. I see squirrels flow up and down the oak tree that might provide, come to think of it, an emergency source of food in the fall if I can figure out what to do with the acorns. The friendly squirrels. I’ll plug them with the Custer’s Last Stand Tribute Rifle. Occasionally, a deer wanders in. I see rabbits, chipmunks, several varieties of woodpecker, neig
hborhood cats, finches, robins, nuthatches, sparrow, ravens, crows, and my favorite bird, the chickadee. There’s a garter snake living under some rocks piled in the corner of the yard. I’ve seen a fox, rats, ducks, and a wild turkey. I suppose that I see more animals than my neighbors to either side because they’ve got strict, tight chain-link fences at the borders to the railroad land.
Today I see something I have never seen before. A bird about the size of a hawk swoops off the oak, down into the mulberry branches, and then hops about among the leaves. Its tail is very long, and it seems to clutch at the bark and twigs with claws poking from the hinge of its wings, like a large bat. I glimpse its head—beakless, featherless, lizardlike, rosy red. The feathers are a slate blue with black tips. The bird, or whatever it is, seems to be eating both fruit and the insects that would be hovering around the tree and crawling on its bark. A graceful thing with fluid, darting movements, it behaves exactly like a lizard-bird. It is captivating. I find the folding binoculars and watch it for as long as I can. In spite of what this tells me about the fate of living creatures and the world in general, I am lost in contemplation. I have that sense of time folding in on itself, the same tranced awareness I experienced in the ultrasound room. I realize this: I am not at the end of things, but the beginning.
* * *
I spend the rest of the day oddly jubilant. I do my exercises, read my books. The day goes quickly, and I use some hot sauce Phil brought to spice up a Thai noodle and peanut butter dish for our dinner. We shut the curtains and eat by candlelight, not only because it’s romantic, but in case anybody tries to look in the window. I show Phil the drawing I’ve made in your notebook/letter.
“Archaeopteryx or something like it, probably not the actual transitional organism, but some species very close. Maybe Confuciusornis. Did you see its mouth clearly? Did it have teeth?”
Phil is helplessly excited, the way I am, and after we eat and even though it’s dusk, he sits in the backyard waiting for the bird to appear. He says that other people have heard of sightings, here and there, of unusual animals. He says, haltingly, that some scientists have been tinkering with genetic repairs.
“What’s that mean?”
“I don’t know if it’s with plants? Animals? People? Or maybe it’s with the babies. Why they’re keeping some of the pregnant women cloistered.”
“Cloistered sounds bad.”
My heart strikes hard, alarm bells, and immediately I try to forget what he said. Phil goes on talking.
“Every service system seems controlled by a separate group. Every city service negotiates with other services. People are forming their own civilian militias, their own rescue posses, hiding pregnant women. Nobody knows anything for sure though. The first thing that happens at the end of the world is that we don’t know what is happening.”
Later, from my window, I watch Phil sitting at the edge of the yard with my binoculars in his lap. From time to time he lifts them and eagerly searches the tops of the oak and mulberry trees. His shoulders are rounded and powerful, his bluntly cropped head of black hair is all ruffled up. He has a passionate mouth, a long, straight nose. His entire being is presented to me unself-consciously, and I find him irresistible to watch. Looking at your father floods me with tenderness. Little being; here we are. It is week 23 and your lungs are getting their surfactant. You’re making breathing movements for practice, and you could just barely survive in a NICU, but the blood vessels in your brain are so delicate that you could have a hemorrhage, especially deep in the middle of your brain, the germinal matrix, so you’re much better off with me. Next week you’ll get your inner ear for balance. As for me, I’m getting milk. I’m getting ready for you. And I must tell you, since we’ll be in hiding once you’re here, I suppose, that I haven’t done badly today with being stuck indoors. Sometimes I’m good at living within limitations. Besides, after all is dark and silent in the street, we go out, all three of us.
Our street never was brightly lighted, and now a few lamps have sputtered out. The light doesn’t penetrate at all into the woods, which is where we go. A small path I know winds through the trees, and once the moon is up we can see just faintly enough to make our way.
As we walk along the inky path, taking small steps, shuffling, we hear noises to every side. Small rustlings, scurrying sounds, odd hoots, now, and bitter coughs of night animals. Phil has one of the guns, and even so, we’re nervous. But to be outside and freely walking together is a pleasure so intense I feel everything too much—the slight movement of air on my face, the softness of duff, the terrain of bark under my hands, the touch of leaves against my clothing, my skin. It all fills me with a charmed awareness. I slide a black leaf between my fingers, tracing the rigid vein up the middle. I gulp the darkness in, the rich turmoil of earth.
September 3
The United States Postal Service has apparently conducted secret negotiations with the National Guard and they’ve formed a joint entity within some states. Each state, that is, which has decided not to answer to the central government, which may not exist, which may be one of the supercorporate entities who have hired the contract mercenary armies that have no country but green money. The entire mail operation is funded by the cash exchange between the customer and the mail carrier. The postal worker takes the cash and pays the National Guard outright for protection, keeping a salary, too. It costs a dollar to mail each letter. Mail service has become the only reliable form of long-distance communication, and everyone uses it now. There are two deliveries a day. It is a quiet morning. I have been awake through dawn, listening to the low and secret calls of the doves in the trees behind the house. There is no wind and the leaves are perfectly still. Phil is gone. I used to know most of the bird cries, but now there are new sounds in the leaves. Some are menacing and dry, others are ravishingly sweet, both familiar and alien.
There is the sudden growl of a motor—a very loud truck. I lift the side of a curtain to see that the mail is being delivered.
An armored personnel carrier prowls the street. A soldier perches behind a mounted swivel machine gun and two others beside him carry assault weapons. Wearing the same dull blue uniform that he always did, plus a helmet and bulletproof vest, our neighborhood postal carrier steps from the passenger’s side of the vehicle. He is a wiry, pleasant Korean-American man whose smile puts soft crinkles into his face. His name is Hiro. He begins to walk his usual route, absorbed in what he has sorted, making certain that names match with addresses, flipping the envelopes along his arm. On the street beside him, the soldiers are alert, scanning the rooftops, swiveling their gun side to side, addressing large handheld telephones that might be old-fashioned walkie-talkies.
I retreat into the living room, sit down in the old green armchair in the corner, and wait. The mail fits through a brass slot in the panel next to the front door. From my chair, I can just see the basket into which it will fall. As I am waiting for Hiro to turn down my sidewalk, walk up my front steps, and drop the mail in the slot, I can hear the tiny gears edge the kitchen clock’s big hand forward. In the tree out back, the mourning dove calls again. The truck’s motor turns over, rumbles forward, pitches. You kick. Hiro’s footsteps approach. He drops the mail into my house and turns away. I used to chat with Hiro when he’d bring the mail, and I suddenly feel the silence. I get out of my chair and walk over to the door, pick up the mail. There are two envelopes of appeals, one from Holy Seal and one from Children’s Way, another three are bills, which I suppose I still have to pay. There are two papers that may or may not fit the theme of the current Zeal. And there is a letter from Eddy.
Dear Cedar,
Things up here are interestingly chaotic. We’ve had to barricade the store, as there has been looting. Our tribe has formed a militia quartered at the casino. Quite a number of us see the governmental collapse as a way to make our move and take back the land. Right now, nobody gives a rat’s ass what we do. Still, I hate to say this, but in a generation it won’t matter. That’s th
e truth of the situation. The wealthiest will get ahold of the technology to reproduce and those few Homo sapiens—at most a couple hundred thousand as there are half a million frozen U.S. embryos and not all of them will take—those few people will own the rest of us, the monkeys.
Except for you. And your baby. I never dream, but I did dream. I dreamed that your baby was fine. Started running as soon as it was born.
So come up here as soon as you can.
I am still doing really well, Cedar, in spite of my worry over you. Please come up here, and stay. Your mom is gone a great deal of the time, as she participates in a round-the-clock camp-out vigil on grass near the shrine. Your saint has recently been sighted, and boy, is she pissed. More on that later. The mail truck comes through the main road once every three days and I’ve got to run to get this on it. Don’t worry, we’re all eating. We’ve moved everything out of the store into our basement and the foodstuffs have a long shelf life (Twinkies approx. forty years). Supersize us! Grandma’s fine and your sister, with no TV to watch, has finished Thus Spake Zarathustra and is immersed in Simone Weil’s biography A Life. Ha, ha. I enclose carbon (!) copies of some recent pages.
Page 3032
Negative Sleep
In the sleep that I do not sleep every night, I find the comfort of mind that enables me not to kill myself throughout the next sleep-tortured day. I call this state of mind, in which I think of sleep but do not actually sleep, negative sleep, for want of a better word. For it is only negative the way a piece of dark film is the shadow image of a photograph—I don’t mean for there to be within the term a value judgment. Especially so because within this dusk of thought, positive sensations bloom. Awake in darkness, I feel the joy of my breath entering and leaving my body without effort. When I match my breath to Sweetie’s slightly clogged exhalations, I become aware of time’s sweet generosity. This is eternity, right here, for eternity is nothing other than awareness of time going by. To lie beside my woman for three hours and fully experience each breath we take together. Bliss. It is the fourth hour that completely sucks. Anxiety worms in. Thoughts of duties tomorrow that will be enlarged by the desperation to rest. Resentment. She sleeps good, why not me? And worse. She rolls over or snorts as I am finally dropping off, causing tears of frustration. The brain starts raving. The brain moves out of its skull and prowls the home looking for a better resting spot.