Future Home of the Living God(18)
I pull on my clothes behind the screen, dash out. He slams a roll of white cloth tape into my hand and tells me to tape him into the chair.
His voice is filled with desperate authority, like in a movie, so I know that instead of voicing the movie confusion and needing to be convinced, I might as well bind him into the chair. It is clear he wants me to escape. Who cares from what. While I wind him into the chair, he asks if I have any special ethnicity. I mean, my hair and eyes are dark but my skin is medium to pale, so I don’t stand out as Native unless people already know.
“Yeah, I’m Ojibwe,” I tell him.
He asks me about the father, is he white?
“As milk,” I said.
“Then get the hell out of here.”
He points out the back way, the back stairs, and tells me to wave the envelope and pretend I’m a delivery person.
“When you get out, don’t tell anybody that you’re pregnant,” he says, “and use that last strip between my teeth.”
*
In addition to cassette players, a VHS player, the usual hipster record player, and old-fashioned speakers, Glen and Sera keep an old-school tube television in the hall closet. It only comes out for Masterpiece Theatre or big events. Now, we need it. Glen is rigging up a sort of antenna. He says that the government has seized the cable companies, but there is still some independent local programming and sometimes an unexpected glance at CNN. The curved green-gray screen spreads on from a central point. He uses a button on the actual TV set to change channels one by one until he finally gets a clear picture and some news. We settle back in the rough orange and mustard yellow couch pillows. The real newspeople have still not returned to the shows, but suddenly there is more content. The talking heads are not military experts or pundits or policy wonks but scientists of every background pulled from the laboratories and classrooms, emerging as though from a dream, their faces still flattened in shock. They rub their eyes, tap their chins, blink rapidly if they are women, and squint if they are men. We are mesmerized and can’t stop watching them one after another and all with the same tics and all saying different things that end with the same advice. We don’t know. Be patient. Science doesn’t have the answers right away. Truth takes time. And meanwhile the station has invented a swirling set of graphics—humanoid figures growing hunched as they walked into the mists of time, while in the background Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony dissolves into a haunting series of hoots and squawks.
On other channels, the cameras are shaky and the nervous reporters are reporting on how there is no reporting. How people are out in the streets, demonstrating against not knowing what they should be demonstrating about. The signs are question marks of every color and size. The churches are full, the sports bars stuffed. People are floating in bewilderment out of their houses onto the sidewalks, even in the punishing hot air. I have come home to watch the world end. Not that it ends! That is the weirdness of it. Here in Minnesota the people interviewed say, I just wanna know. Is it a big deal to wanna know? We’ll be okay, right? I just wanna know.
Nobody knows. I curl deeper into the big sectional couch alongside Sera and Glen in the blessedly air-conditioned house where I grew up, a huge and comfortably renovated brick and stucco prairie-style place, in a pleasant part of Minneapolis near a wide green lake invaded by quagga mussels and purple loosestrife. Bubbles of public speculation float over us. During one of Sera’s many self-invented ceremonies, which she put together from her eclectic readings on indigenous culture and Rudolf Steiner, we placed sacred tobacco all around our house and then smudged white candles with sage and stuck them in the ground and lighted them. We ate bread, walnut paté. I drank ginger beer, and my parents drank wine. We curled up on blankets in the grass and sang peace-march songs until we fell asleep. It is one of the best memories of my life. I suppose that I was wishing for some kind of comforting ceremony now, but perhaps the search for information camped around the TV was it.
Today is the day I’ve promised myself to make the announcement. To tell Glen and Sera I’m pregnant. I tried just after the news broke, when I walked in the door, but I felt so sorry for them. They are devastated on such a fundamental level. Sera sits in the downstairs den, in front of the TV’s ancient bulk, her long, beautiful white-gray hair streaming down her back and her eyes full of tears. The ice blue yarn of a sweater she’s knitting is heaped in her lap. Her fingers are frozen around the needles. It is so rare that she can’t knit; I don’t know when I’ve ever seen it. And there is dear Glen with his skinny little ponytail, his perfect chambray shirt wrinkling and unwrinkling with each troubled breath, his eyebrows working up and down over his rimless eyeglasses. Glen takes my hand and holds it. I grip his hand, hard. We’re solid. Ours is an uncomplicated love. He gives one of his soul-pressed sighs and says, “We don’t need words.”
“Yes, we do,” cries Sera, gripping the fancy skein of silk/Italian wool blend yarn. “We need one word. We need the word ‘love.’ We need it worse than ever. What if the word ‘love’ is to vanish from the world?”
Glen’s sigh catches in his chest, and then I blurt out what I’ve come to think may be true. I say it to comfort poor Sera, but I take heart myself.
“No,” I say, “this is love. This is what’s happening. This is creation’s love of creation.”
Glen smiles gently.