The floor? The couch?
Only with the greatest of efforts am I able to return to a state of negative sleep, that or a drug. I’ve tried many and some work temporarily but all that are effective are also addictive, and I wish to have but one addiction. Thought. The pleasures of the mind. Thought saves me in the end. I find that if I try to solve some knotty ethical issue or plan the next few pages of my manuscript, the abstract focus triggers a quick avalanche. Slumber hits. As the room brightens I am lulled into a gentler state and by the time Sweetie rises I am nodding off for real. I’m out. If no one wakes me, I can remain comatose for hours. But usually there’s an emergency for me to tend to by nine o’clock. I do often rise in a state of bitterness. But memories of my negative sleep tide me over and I do not kill myself.
PS: Must scrawl this in: Surprise visit from the Nagamojig. Bimibatoog.
I am so excited at receiving a letter from Eddy and by the last line, which I look up in my Ojibwe dictionary and find refers to song—i.e., People who sing; i.e., Songmaker—that I made the mistake of opening it next to the slim rectangle of windows that flank my door on either side. So when the doorbell rings, I automatically look out of the window straight into Hiro’s face. He smiles gravely at me and waves a letter with a green slip stuck to it—apparently I need to sign. I open the door before thinking, then try to shut it, too late. Hiro instantly registers my pregnancy and steps in front of me, anxious that I not be visible from the street. He blocks the door, makes no comment, gives me the letter. It is hand-addressed in writing I do not recognize, and there is no return address.
“Do you know who it is from?” he asks.
When I say that I have no idea, Hiro gently lifts the envelope from my fingers and removes the green slip, then hands back my piece of mail.
“Given your condition, I would advise you not to sign this,” he says. “I’d advise you not to link your name with a physical address. And don’t open your door to anybody else.”
I step back into a safer, shadowy spot in the hallway, and Hiro scans the street.
“I’ll have a letter to mail tomorrow,” I say.
“Put it underneath the mat with nothing sticking out, nothing visible. Tape your dollar onto it. Don’t let anybody see you.”
Hiro lifts his finger up and shakes it.
“Nobody!” he says.
Then Hiro leaves.
I walk back to the kitchen and gaze out into the backyard mindlessly, through the binoculars, then without them, for about an hour. At last I feel a bit less anxious about everything—my parents appearing at Eddy and Sweetie’s on the run, Eddy said in Ojibwemowin. And me stupidly showing myself to Hiro. I am able to make myself a lunch of fresh corn with butter—yes, both are available. I thought this might be the last we’d see of corn—a technology-dependent crop, but as it is genetically enhanced, its whole physical backslide might be very much off. There is no telling. Things aren’t going backward at a uniform or predictable rate at all. Phil has told me that broccoli and cauliflower don’t turn out anymore—he’s talked to someone who says it all comes out a weedy, wild, cabbagey kind of plant. Yet there is corn, and even better, popcorn. Phil found bags of it stuffed under the church kitchen sink, left over from a Good Friday showing of The Passion of the Christ.
I eat alone, stuffing popcorn into my mouth, watching the fuzz on the television screen falter and clear, words burbling through, nothing intelligible. I’m just eager for any sort of information, I suppose, even unintelligible scrawls. I desperately miss my parents, both sets. And now I am terribly worried about Sera and Glen, for Eddy and Sweetie will no doubt have told them about my pregnancy, which will cause them to return to the city where I gather they are being hunted by the same sort of people of harrowing goodwill who are presently living in my childhood house. I can’t think what Glen or Sera might have done besides live the life they’ve always lived, but maybe that’s enough.
Dear Eddy and Big Mary and family,
I am doing very well and do not need for you or anyone to visit me, as I have got support and am feeling just fine. It was wonderful to hear from you, and I’ll write again soon. Just be sure you take good care of yourselves. Please tell me what my special saint is pissed about.
Love, Cedar
September 5
I work away at my desk before the screened window overlooking the back of the house. The leaves are a dense green and the hum and clicking chatter of bird sounds merges with my flow of thought. Then suddenly I look up. A young man. He is peering in the side window, fingers cupped around his head to block the glare from the glass. I can see the outline of his face, eager and flushed. His eyes roll, taking in the room. I can’t tell whether I’ve been seen or not. I slip from my chair and crouch underneath my desk, from which I can just see the kitchen and the back door. The knob of my yellow kitchen door slowly turns as this balloon-headed boy tries to enter. But the door is locked. It always is. Now a scrabble of voices rounds the side of the house and I catch sight of two young men. They are fair, fresh, neatly dressed in pale orange and coral-pink button-down-collar shirts. Their torsos are soft and round, the shirts are tugged hard to peg smoothly into belted and pressed blue jeans. There is a tap on my front door. I hold my breath. Silence. I creep along the bottom of the wall underneath the window, into the living room, where I can see my side of the front door.
“We know you’re in there,” one of the young men calls out in a light, cheerful voice. “My name is Clark! No need to hide. And this is Emeric! We’re friendly! Just out doing a little neighborhood survey. Didn’t you get our newsletter? The invitation?”
I suddenly think of the return-receipt letter, which in the agitation that accompanied receiving the letter from Eddy, I left on the table in the front hallway. I never looked at it. This must be what they are talking about—the letter, the invitation. Now a piece of paper slips gently under the door and slides onto the linoleum of the vestibule. I think that I hear them walk away, but I can’t be sure. I let the paper sit there. I watch it until the sun goes down.
Dear Neighbor,
Please come to a picnic! Housing records indicate that you have not yet registered with your new residential authority regarding change of address, and we are concerned about the title to your house—a possible extinguishment of title is distinctly possible. This is a chance to clear up any problems with your residence permit and to meet new friends. Food will be provided by Uniters. Please bring your driver’s license or other former United-States-government-issued enhanced form of identification, as well as proof of home ownership. September 8, 5:00–10:00. Under the tent in True Manna Park.
We’ll see you there!
Clark and Emeric
Uniters
When Phil comes home, rolling quietly up the lawn and around the back of the house, I show him the invitation and ask him where True Manna Park is located.
“I would guess it’s the park on the corner,” he says, giving me that under-the-eyebrows look I’ve come to know as the one he uses before he tells me some new piece of disturbing information.
“That’s Manito Park.”
“There’s new names,” he says. Then he informs me that two or three mornings ago everything had new names. All the street signs were changed overnight. It was a massive project, impressive. Even the streets with numbers got switched.
“They are now . . .” He stumbles. “Well, they’re Bible verses.”
“I don’t live on Boutwell Street anymore?”
“Well, you do according to the U.S. Postal Service. They’re still operating under a secular postmaster general. Otherwise, you live on Proverbs 10:7.”
Wait, I think I know that verse.
“The memory of the righteous is a blessing, but the name of the wicked will rot?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
Phil and I sit down together on the couch, contemplating the fact that someone wants our names, which are probably classed as wicked, to rot. The blinds are closed. We
are lost in confounded silence. He reaches out and puts my hand in his and folds his fingers around my fist. We have a few days to decide what to do and my mind is riffling through options. Go to the picnic disguised somehow? How? I’m really poking out now. Even I can’t deny that I’m obviously pregnant. Hiro knew immediately. Not go at all and wait to see what happens next? Run? Run where? But Phil has thought way ahead of me and come up with something different. The light is very low—just flickers of one of the candles from the two dozen boxes of votive lights that Phil swiped from the church. My couch is deep and wide, a hand-me-down from the Songmaker recreation room, soft with heavy down-stuffed cushions. Phil pushes me gently back into the cushions and then gazes at me, his face all shadows.
“Cedar.”
His face changes and he slides down my body until he’s kneeling on the floor with his face pressed against my belly. He looks up at me, the light warm on his bones. His eyes are full of darkness.
“Will you marry me?”
September 6
So that’s how your father and I decide to get married. Phil is going back to the church today in order to forge papers and signatures, seals and credentials. Our priest is helping lots of people, he says. He’ll create a marriage certificate for the two of us and Phil will bring it to the picnic along with the title to my house and whatever papers we can concoct to make the two of us seem as one. I’ll be gone, of course, on a church retreat of some kind. Phil’s got a social smoothness that he’s developed in his work—that will help a lot. I think he’ll somehow convince the neighborhood association that he’s legit, or that we are. As for getting married, I know it sounds cut-and-dried, as though we decided out of expediency, but that’s not how it felt.
Looking into the dense and noisy green out in back of the house, during the day, I think of how physically happy Phil and I can be. And when that happens I close my eyes and listen to the roar and clatter of the world as it rushes by. We are rushing too. The wind is whipping past us. We are so brief. A one-day dandelion. A seedpod skittering across the ice. We are a feather falling from the wing of a bird. I don’t know why it is given to us to be so mortal and to feel so much. It is a cruel trick, and glorious.
* * *
Dear Cedar,
Writing by return mail. The Nagamojig are gone now. Ingiiwiindamowaananig. According to your mom, Kateri Tekakwitha appeared in a cloud of mist exactly two weeks ago today. It is true that she appeared to Jeff “Skeeters” Monroe, in his cups and after an unusually grievous monetary loss. But as he is reliable otherwise, on the tribal council (hysterical laughter), she contends that his version of the event is credible.
Skeeters says that a beautiful Native girl, traditionally dressed, gradually emerged from a cloudy ball and stood balanced on the point of her boulder. She jumped down in a swirl of buckskin and stood on the grass. On her face there was no beatific smile but a steely frown. She stared at him, for a long time he says. Her hair was brown, her eyes were brown, her skin a light gold. She said, “All of you are nothing but a bunch of idiots.”
Jeff was the first one to sober up and quit gambling, and since him there has been a wave of sobriety vows. Where she stood on the grass, just under her feet, two crosses were scorched into the sod.
Of course, there were those who visited the site and then bet big the next day, believing she’d improved their luck. I don’t know where all this gambling money is going anymore. We’re losing track of things. I’m trying to persuade the council to keep closer tabs on the casino revenue and take back our land but there is sort of a runaway what-the-hell feeling here. Yet even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made (Poe). The world out-Herods Herod. The gigantic clock of ebony with brazen lungs, whose music made the giddiest grow pale, has struck.
So that’s the big excitement. There have been round-the-clock vigils.
Sweetie’s vigiling right now. People often hallucinate during times of stress. Still, I think your saint is right.
September 7
I have spent the day meticulously constructing a secret food cache in the basement. I have my tool bucket and my drill. The basement wall/foundation is cinder block, two thick, except for one unexpected place that an electrician showed to me way back when he displayed the old grounded wires for the former owner’s computer room. There is another little crawl space beneath the foundation of the back porch. If I pry two blocks loose, I can slide in sealed plastic containers and cans, then replace the blocks. I have already put the cigarettes in there, but I need to enlarge the opening. I spend the afternoon chipping at the mortar and slowly I succeed in removing the blocks. A normal-sized person might actually fit inside this truly hideous and claustrophobic little space. Not me though. I’m the size of what in medieval times they used to call a hogshead barrel. I’m so heavy and round, now, that I find myself wishing that I could be moved around on casters.
You have eyebrows, eyelashes, even a little hair. Your footprints and fingerprints are legible now and the complex components of your eyes have formed even though you will not open your lids for a couple of weeks. Sight is the last sense to develop. The nerve connections in your hands are still perfecting themselves. Your brain, the big question mark, has been making 5000 neurons every minute ever since you were four weeks old. Every nerve cell can make 10,000 connections. All along, the neurons have been steadily migrating to their destinations. I guess they just know where to go from the moment they are formed. They travel in waves, millions every day, moving along glial pathways. You’ve got all of your neurons now, billions and billions, and with every second two million new connections are made between them, more connections than stars in the sky.
While I am down in the cellar, thinking these things, working on the stash, fitting the blocks back into the wall, I hear a woman scream. Then maddened rough barking from a deep-chested dog. The ripsaw shriek seems to come from the trees and yard out back. The barking too. I rush upstairs and I see, out the back window, not a woman but an enormous, powerful sand-colored blur. The animal bounds through the air toward a shocked-looking chocolate Lab, which disappears in its embrace. The thing—some kind of great cat, all muscle and powerful guile—tears long front fangs into and chokes down the bleeding haunches of the dog right there, and then drags the dog’s head and torso up into the big oak tree. It secures the carcass in the crotch of a couple of branches and then stretches itself along another branch.
When Phil comes in the door, I call him into the kitchen and tell him that a giant cat is sitting out back in an oak tree munching on a chocolate Lab.
“I didn’t know cougars liked chocolate,” he says.
I stare at him thoughtfully until he looks away, then he turns and glares back at me.
“You’ve lost your sense of humor.”
“That’s not funny.”
Phil looks down at his shoes and I can tell that his feelings are actually hurt.
“You are not registering this,” I say in my most intense voice, “there is a saber-toothy cat thing in the oak tree eating a chocolate Lab.”
We lock gazes and then, all of a sudden, with no warning, we are both collapsed in laughter, spinning out of control, crazy, weak, until we’re gasping on the floor.
* * *
We go out on the roof instead that night, and Phil hauls along the Bushmaster. We sit on the low peak in the shadow of the small brick chimney. From there, as we are on the side of a hill, we can see down over the half-grown trees that replaced giant elms, into the miles of neighborhoods that spread south from downtown. They are lower-working-class and working-poor neighborhoods with rickety old Victorians or small ramblers like mine packed together neatly, just a strip of lawn between, or maybe a chain-link fence. Everything is dark now. Just flickers of light. Sometimes, rarely, a bonfire or a larger fire illuminates some corner of the city. Tonight, a house spouts huge orange flames. The cries and shouts are too small and far away to hear. Even the c
rackle of gunfire, far off, inconsequential as a string of firecrackers. And the sky has bloomed, it is verdant with stars. I’ve never seen stars like this before. Deep, brilliant, soft. I am comforted because nothing we have done to this earth affects them. I think of the neurons in your brain connecting, branching, forming the capacity I hope you will have for wonder. They are connecting, like galaxies. Perhaps we function as neurons ourselves, interconnecting thoughts in the giant mind of God.
“What really happened,” I say to Phil. “Do you know, do they know?”
“Your explanation, God got tired of us, makes about as much sense as anything I’ve heard,” says Phil.
Again, it seems to me that he wants to elaborate, to say something else that is dangling in his thoughts. But he holds my hand with both of his hands. His hands are always warm and I let myself be enveloped.
After a while he starts talking again, and we both pull out everything we ever learned or read about in biology classes, about duplications in the human genome. How the duplicated genes and chromosome segments suggest that our genome has doubled, maybe even more than once. When’s unclear, but roughly around the time we diverged from one of our vertebrate ancestors—500 million years ago, give or take a mil? Anyway, this doubling means that our genome is full of rearrangements and repeats. Riddled with redundancy. On one hand, this gives us a certain evolutionary advantage because we’ve got some built-in flexibility. A copy of a DNA sequence can mutate, can even find out whether its new function works, and there’s often a spare to carry on. More often, though, there is this weird thing that happens.