Future Home of the Living God(21)
“Oh honey, I’m so happy. I’m so relieved!”
She leaves a new pancake to burn while she comes over to the counter and buries me in a hug, a really satisfying hug. I am glad to get a hug like this, for my own reasons, not hers. I need that hug so much that I cling to her until those tears in her eyes fall.
“You’re vicious.” She stands back, wiping at her face with the palm of her hand.
“You should get your tetanus shot. They’re good for ten years. It’s an ugly way to die.”
“I will, I will,” she promises, “though I don’t think that contracting tetanus is going to be the big problem.”
“Cholera?”
“No,” she says, “reproduction.”
I form my lips around words but no sound emerges.
She succeeds in making two perfect pancakes, and passes them to me on a plate, whipped butter swirling in the center. And there’s expensive real maple syrup from Canada because maples here no longer produce. Sera has always loved presenting Glen and me with artful snacks, with made-from-scratch chicken soup when we were sick, with bowls of garlic mashed potatoes when we were sad, and now, with cornmeal pancakes to stave off the apocalypse.
Glen enters and sits down with his plate of pancakes. He cuts his into buttery squares, pours half the syrup over the cut squares, then forks them rapidly into his mouth. I’ve always known him to eat quickly when emotionally disturbed.
“Slow down,” says Sera. “You’re upset. I mean, of course you are. But slow down anyway.”
But his eyes are distant and black—people sometimes think that Glen is my real father. When I was little, his hair was totally dark. He shows the Norman Conquest in the appreciation of his food, too, and his love of rituals surrounding meals. When he cooks, all else stops. Sera and I used to sit at the counter drinking wine while he crushed basil, toasted pine nuts, happily struggled over complicated recipes. So it’s a sign of his distress, just shoveling food in, and this afternoon he can’t seem to stop. He doesn’t hear Sera, and he finishes the pancakes hardly pausing for a breath. When they are gone, he looks at us, bewildered.
“I think of one thing, and then another, and I don’t know what to do.”
“Well, here’s one thing you don’t have to worry about,” says Sera. “Cedar got herself vaccinated. She won’t get anything major.”
I open my mouth to speak, it is the perfect moment to announce that I have contracted, so to speak, the most major thing of all, given the situation. I put my lips around the words “I’m pregnant,” but just can’t blurt them out. Sera is so happy with my tiny bit of news; the odds of my survival are suddenly, irrationally, increased in her confused thoughts. I just can’t ruin her sole moment of hope. So I begin to talk to my parents about the numbers, the millions and billions, even knowing that they aren’t going to understand on a visceral level, the way timeless time got to me when I looked at you on an ultrasound screen. They aren’t going to see into that measureless dimension. To add the shock of you to the crumbling of their foundations is too much.
We waft outside. The late summer light bleeds on and on. My parents share a bottle of wine and don’t notice that I drink lemonade instead, or that I cannot finish my pancakes. We sit on the back porch. They wave at neighbors, trot to the fence to chat, wiping sweat off their foreheads. We make plans to stay, to run, to hide, to live normally. We decide to stay vigilant, then argue about whether vigilance is a strategy. And all the while as the light slants lower and lower, bathing us in a gorgeous, smoldering glow, my heart slowly cracks. The deep orange-gold of the sun is pure nostalgia. An antique radiance already sheds itself upon this beautiful life we share. I grow heavy, rooted in my lawn chair. Everything I say and everything my parents say, the drift of friends, the tang of lemonade, the wine on their tongues, the cries of sleepy birds and the squirrels launching themselves without fear in the high tops of the old maples and honey locusts, branch to branch, all of this is terminal. There will never be another August on earth, not like this one; there will never be this sort of ease or precision. The birds will change, the squirrels will fall, and who will remember how to make the wine?
We laugh at funny memories, we hold one another’s hands. We agree that this whole development is a bitter triumph for secularism. Creationism bites the dust, big-time. But as my parents fall silent, and I look at the landscaped yard in the failing light, and wonder how the birds will turn out, I know that we’ve come to the end of science. Human beings might be saved by science. It might happen, but I am quite sure even then there will be no true explanation. If evolution has reversed, we’ll never know why, any more than we know why it began. It is like consciousness. We can map the brain and parse out the origins of thoughts, even feelings. We can tell everything about the brain except why it exists. And why it thinks about itself. So the more I consider all of this, the more it seems that our predicament would be best addressed by an acknowledgment of the Anima Mundi, the Soul of the World.
I say good night and walk slowly up the stairs, carpeted the day after I hit my head at three, tumbling down those stairs when they were hardwood. I suffered a slight concussion. I still have a tiny scar at my hairline. The story is that Sera called a carpet store the next morning and bullied them into an emergency installation. So my footsteps are muffled creaks, and heavy, but my hand on the polished banister is light. I brush everything I pass, as if to touch it good-bye. That night, as I am falling asleep in my childhood room, which is used partly as a guest room but still has my soccer trophies and dolls in it, I lie on my back and fold my hands right over you. As I descend into welcome unknowingness, I bob up, once. There is something I have to do, I think. And the next morning I remember that I have decided to write this—your diary—a record and an inquiry into the strangeness of things.