Future Home of the Living God(15)

“A baby!” She pulls away from me and puts her hands on my shoulders and looks into my eyes. “A baby.” I think she might dissolve into sobs and gulps, but she only hugs me again, this time with bursts of back pats. There is so much feeling in her and she suddenly seems so open and so revealing of her heart that I decide to ask about my biological father.

“Did my father, my biological father, have any features or genetic illnesses that my baby might inherit?” I ask her. “I should know, now, Sweetie. Please tell me.”

“Oh, god.” She draws away from me and jams her hand in her pocket and pulls out the shoelace, puts it in her mouth. “Makes me wanna smoke.” She begins to chew the lace. “I only had one yet today. I don’t wanna smoke around you neither.” She waves her hand at me, pulls passionately at the shoelace between her teeth.

She wants to tell me, she says, but she still freezes when she attempts to talk about him. Their relationship was one of trauma and heartbreak, she says.

“He’s a kinda medicine man.”

That intrigues me, probably more than it should. Perhaps there is someone in my background with extraordinary powers, after all. The words ‘‘medicine man” give me hope. Maybe Sweetie went to him for healing and maybe something else happened, they fell in love perhaps. Maybe his family could not accept her. Things got so bad that she drank and drugged until I was removed from her. It is all suitably vague.

“It would mean a lot for me to know,” I say, although I already see that my fake memories might be the ones to keep.

“Ey”—she looks at me with the shoelace dangling—“ey.”

“Yes,” I prod. “Was he tall, fat, skinny? How brown? What did he look like?”

“Kinda good-looking in a brutal way,” she nods, her eyes wide. “Like his face, it was high-boned like them Lakota guys, and he was tall. From a knife fight scarred here, and here.” She lightly touches her left cheekbone, her upper lip. “Not so good-looking when I met him. But he had a dark power.”

I smile at her, eager for more.

“You’re kidding! Oh my god, a dark power? Like an Indian Darth Vader!”

Sweetie shrugs and looks away and I know she will say nothing more now. I suddenly realize that what I said was way too close to sarcasm, or maybe it was the way I said it. I’ve embarrassed her and I am instantly ashamed of myself. Sweetie goes to get a drink, she says, of water. I think she might hook herself a beer from the fridge and I get even madder at my thoughtless remark. Maybe this attraction to a scary kind of energy in men is passed down from woman to woman, through time. There was Sweetie’s mistake, and I have had my share of sociopaths. But no more. I have broken precedent, for your father is neither enraged nor depressed. He is not a twisted spiritual advisor. He is not a desperation junkie or a mental health survivor. He is, however, not my type.

The next morning, before I leave for the casino, to meet Sera, I turn on the television. Reports are coming in of experiments hastily conducted on fruit flies, DNA experts who say on the molecular level it is like skipping around in time, and that small-celled creatures and plants have been shuffling through random adaptations for months now. And hasn’t anyone noticed that dogs, cats, horses, pigs, et cetera have stopped breeding true?

And yet . . . there is something about this wash of information that strikes me as too much, and what I mean by that is the information seems flimsier, with bouts of . . . cuteness. Why would I think this? Am I infected with Eddy’s paranoia? I lean closer. The people who are reading the news are different, I think, and although I never watched the news much it seems that the people are all the same person. And they don’t seem like trained television journalists. They stumble over their words. Fret. They make faces. The women are fewer, the ones who appear seem awkward, all in their twenties, white with white teeth, yellow or brown hair, sparkling eyes. The men are all white with white teeth, sharp jawlines, sparkling eyes. I switch through the few channels that come in, over and over, increasingly panicked. There are no brown people, anywhere, not in movies not on sitcoms not on shopping channels or on the dozens of evangelical channels up and down the remote.

Something is bursting through the way life was. Everything has changed while I wasn’t looking, changed without warning or word.

I hit the power button and try to breathe. Adrenaline isn’t good for a baby, right? Eventually, I go to the kitchen and sit down for tea and toast with Sweetie. Little Mary is already off at school, and Grandma Virginia is still dozing lightly underneath her golden quilt. We talk of little things, ignore the big. I call the casino to talk to Sera and Glen and make plans, but they checked out early. Probably they decided to drive back down to Minneapolis, but Sera does not answer her cell phone. Out of range, I think, but it makes me uneasy. As I leave, Sweetie hands me a folded sheaf of paper through the car window and says, “Read this when you stop to pee.”

The first is from Sera. It says, “Martial law. Remember what that means.” I do remember.

Okay, I think. I can do that. Get prepared. Stock up. Get my money. Hide my passport.

The other papers are from Eddy.

*



Page 3028

An Announcement That Brought Incongruous Joy

By rights, knowing what we do know even now, the announcement made to me by my stepdaughter should have been a reason to kill myself today. I should have feared the inevitable pain that a pregnancy in times like these—uncertain to say the least—will bring to her and to our family. I should have wanted to opt out of my role. But instead, as she told me she would be having a baby, I found myself thinking in a very natural and even excited way about this child, who will be our first grandchild. It was an unexpected reaction, given that in this present world crisis we have no idea what this child might be like, and given that Mary a.k.a. Cedar is so recently rediscovered. But I am not about to argue with any positive emotion that breaks through the darkness of the veil. I felt as though for a moment the curtain was ripped aside and the light shone lovingly in.