Future Home of the Living God(22)

I creep out while Sera and Glen are still shut in their bedroom, mumbling themselves awake into another day of realization. I will have to write from the familiarity of my own lair of thought in South Minneapolis, my house on a forgotten dead end running right up to an unused railroad embankment. I bought the tiny bungalow with money I inherited from my Songmaker grandmother. I’m lucky. The backyard pours into the tangle of forgotten railroad right-of-way, overgrown with scruffy trees. As I pull out of my parents’ driveway, I look back through the rearview. Something is off. I stop the car. The porch lights, which usually burn through the night, into morning, are extinguished. The street is without electricity. The whole neighborhood has lost power. Which is not unusual, and yet it seems that something much worse has happened, for my graceful childhood street has the stillness of an ancient dream, the muted perfection of a “before” disaster photograph. I try to shake off this disquiet. But all the way back along the calm, empty South Minneapolis streets, I feel that, instead of the past, it is the future that haunts us now.



August 15

I have already felt you move. Your bones are hardening, your brain is hooked up to stereo—your ears. So you can hear me, you can hear my voice. You can hear me praying in the car and as I enter the house. You can hear me as I read aloud the first words of my letter to you. I am going to tell you everything, bit by bit, day by day.

To begin with:

I lift the envelope that holds your ultrasound picture. I’m scared to look, still I slip out the picture and press down the edges. But the ultrasound doesn’t tell me much. The markings make no sense to me. Carefully, I tape your first picture onto the cover of this bound journal. Then I use a roll of clear packing tape to cover the picture. But I’m disappointed, disoriented. I thought women loved their ultrasounds, saved them, so maybe I’ll get a feeling for the gray and white blur of limbs and head that feel so alien yet ordinary.

Our house is a small two-bedroom rambler, backyard a blissful disorder, front yard tangled too. Entry set far back from the street. It is a place I could afford only for its lack of a garage, which remains half built. The outside is plain beige and the inside also similarly mute. I’ve only made my imprint on the kitchen—a friendly yellow—and the utility room—space-age white. The walls I’ve newly added insulation to are open—I have the Sheetrock but I haven’t closed them up. A work in progress. Still, this is our haven and our den, the place I can be merely the nameless being I am, a two-decade-plus collection of quirks and curiosities, the biochemical machine that examines its own mind, the searcher who believes equally in the laws of physics and the Holy Ghost, in reading my favorite theologian, Hans Küng (the one chastised by Ratzinger but loved by our present pope), and trying to live by the seven Ojibwe teachings, Truth Respect Love Bravery Generosity Wisdom Humility, which I’ve only read about and do not know from, say, a real Ojibwe person.

I sit down on the edge of my bed and untie my tennis shoes, lifting each foot onto my knee. Then I kneel beside the bed, as I always do, grab my rosary from around the post and say a few Hail Marys, for comfort. I crawl into bed and sleep for two hours. You kick and somersault and I dream as one does in the light—fitfully, racingly, dreams of paranoia and those CNN graphics. The telephone wakes me, an old-fashioned analog landline. The ring sounds like it might be your father’s ring and I don’t answer it. You rock from side to side in the cradle of my hip bones. I sit up, and gulp down a glass of stale water. It is late morning now. I pick up the academic paper I was reading what seems a light-year ago, titled “The Madonna’s Conception Through the Ear”; it is an examination of the belief that God’s whispered breath caused the Incarnation. After twenty minutes, I put the pages down.

“What did he say?” The ceiling is cloudy, sandpapered, rubbed almost blue here and there like real sky. “What was the word that just did it for Mary?”

The word intrigues me, now more than ever, the idea of a word so uncanny, a word so powerful, a word actually so divine that its expression infuses a woman’s body with a pregnancy of godly nature.

Of course, I know that for most theologians the Incarnation was not caused by some literal and actual word or utterance. The word is an idea, the idea of God. Küng has pointed out that the Incarnation itself could not be related only to the mathematical or mystical point of the birth or conception of Jesus, but must be related to Jesus’s life and death as a whole. Still, the idea of this actual word continues to preoccupy me and to suggest that somewhere outside the actual human experience of words spoken, words thought, there exists a language or perhaps a pre-language made up of words so unthinkably holy they cannot be said, much less known.

Perhaps you will know how to speak this language. Perhaps it is a language that we have forgotten in our present form. Perhaps you are dreaming in this language right now. And perhaps there is a word that has changed the course of human existence. A word written in the depth of things, a word within the quantum and genetic and synaptic codes, a word that told all beings and all life—enough.

Sometimes my brain races so hard I can’t keep up with it, which is why I’m glad I live alone. I don’t know what I’ll do when you are here. Write on your diapers? On you? Here and there, I scribble messages, notes, ideas for the next issue of Zeal. I have to somehow imbue the in-progress issue with the shattering development; I have to figure out a theme. I have several articles and a dozen academic papers to sort through and decide whether there is something I can use. As always, I will probably end up writing a contribution myself, too, under an assumed name.