Future Home of the Living God(20)

I’m not angry with Sera for disparaging your kind, whatever that may be, and although I do feel pleased that Glen stuck up for cave paintings I refrained from telling him that they were created by people pretty much like us only 14,000 years ago. Not even an eye blink. I am beginning to see that what the paleontologist says is true—we do not understand how much time has passed on this planet and we have no concept of our limited place in the enormousness of that time. But numbers are haunting me, big numbers. Time is not like millions in things, or money, or people. In terms of time, a million years is almost ungraspable. My brain wobbles when I go past recorded history. I can’t imagine 4.4 million years, which is thought to be the outside figure on the amount of time we’ve been roughed out as proto-human. Homo erectus just goes back just a mil. We’ve been ourselves, Homo sapiens, for something like 300,000 years. We got to be us somewhere in the Pleistocene. I positively can’t go to billions—the 4.6 that is our planet’s age, or imagine 100 million years, which is the amount of time that dinosaurs were the dominant life-form on earth. Dinosaurs lasted so much longer than we have, or probably will, yet their brains were so little. Meaning that stupidity is a good strategy for survival? Our level of intelligence could be a maladaptation, a wrong turn, an aberration. This should be a terrible thought to me, extremely disappointing, but somehow, perhaps because I am carrying you, little baby, I can’t seem to feel the level of consternation that this news causes in everyone else.

Perhaps it is because I saw your brain in an icy whirl, your blood as fire, your tiny hand—which maybe was not a normal baby’s hand? Still, you are wondrous, a being of light, and I am not afraid.

“Are you all right?”

Sera appears in the kitchen and lifts away my empty milk glass. Then she begins in an eager and precise way to remove bins of sugar and flour. She takes out her graduated measuring spoons and expertly scoops out and tosses salt and baking soda into a bowl. My mom often cooks when troubled, and before I decide whether to give her question an honest answer she has mixed up a batch of pancake batter.

“That’s a strange thing to make on an August afternoon,” I say. “We should be eating corn on the cob or watermelon, shouldn’t we?”

But she is already ladling the batter onto a smoking black cast-iron pancake griddle—it has a gleaming pitch patina and belonged to her mom.

“Comfort food.”





“Okay, Mom. But I still think it’s odd.”

Sera seems mesmerized by the pancake batter she spilled with such slow expertise that it made a perfect circle. She is watching for the little bubbles in the center that will tell her when to flip the pancake. Her hair is now twisted on top of her head with a beaded clip, and her ragged, sexy chignon shines with a metallic vigor. Early on, she went not gray, but silvery white; her eyes are deep blue and her skin very fine and clear. A winter fairy queen is what she always looks like to me—ethereal and wise. Not that I always agree with her occasionally whacked ideas.

“Mom.”

“I’m sorry now.” She puts her spatula down with a sudden flailing clatter and claps a hand to her mouth. Her eyes pop with tears.

“What?”

“Your vaccinations, darling. Is it too late?”

Throughout my childhood, again and again, filling out forms every school year, Sera refused to vaccinate me. It is her suspicion that additives in the shots or the vaccines themselves cause autism or mercury poisoning. I was one of several students at my alternative school unprotected, though, and I was fine with it until I read about Native susceptibility to European viruses. Nine of every ten of us died of measles, smallpox, what-have-you. As a descendant of that tough-gened tenth person I had some natural inherent immunity, but still. Now, Sera’s sudden horror at the coming possibility of mayhem, rampant disease, whatever else, irritates me so intensely that for a moment I let her suffer.

“Yeah, it’s way too late. I’ll probably contract adult-onset polio, or a blazing case of the measles. Maybe I’ll keel dead of whooping cough before we find how this all turns out. I’ll be sorry to miss it.”

“God, Cedar, please don’t. We’ll get a doctor.”

“You don’t have a doctor. Which I think is wrong.”

“Glen has one. We’ll get his doctor to vaccinate you.”

“Mom, vaccinations take years to work. You need a whole cycle of them. Remember when you were vaccinated? You’ll be safe, at least. You’ll be the one holding my hand as I puke black blood and itch myself to death from smallpox.”

The pancake starts burning and she scrapes it off and throws it in the garbage. She looks at me, stricken for a moment, then suspicious. It dawns on her that I wouldn’t actually say these things if there was any possibility of them coming true.

“Cedar.”

“Yes?”

“Did you get yourself vaccinated?”

“Of course. When I was eighteen. For you, not vaccinating me was a class thing. Upper-class delusionals can afford to indulge their paranoias only because the masses bear the so-called dangers of vaccinations.”

She ignored what she would usually have called me being obnoxious, and just stood there, struck with relief.

“You never told me you did it!”

“Well, duh, I didn’t want to get you mad.”