Future Home of the Living God(24)
I am sitting there, thinking into the blue, when, without my touching the keys, a woman’s face blooms onto the screen.
“Hello,” she says, just to me, her eyes meeting mine. “I am Mother. How are you today?”
I do not answer. My computer camera is taped over, but the speakers must be on. There must be a problem with the power button. It’s as if she knows I’m here.
“How are you feeling?” she asks. Her voice is drenched with warmth. “I care. I’d like to know.”
Her face is round and white like pizza dough. Her cheeks sag. Her smile is tiny with thin stripes of red lip. Her brown hair, a Prince Valiant helmet, sits firmly on her skull. Her shrewd brown eyes twinkle. She is wearing an apricot-colored blouse with a draped neckline.
“How are you feeling?” she asks, again, and again. “How are you, dear?”
August 20
All the lights on, the blinds shut, the reading lamps glowing on my desk, white paper and white walls. I try to call your Songmaker grandparents but there is no answer on any of their numbers. I don’t leave messages. They’ll call me back when they can. I have avoided the computer after it conjured up the helmet-haired entity. I still have my cell phone but I am cautious and only check it once a day for news. I scroll through to try and shield myself. No cellular data. No location services. Anyway, the news. There is more consternation, greater piles of details that seem more misleading than useful, a specially convened emergency session of Congress, more findings. Men in dark suits staring at large-screen ultrasound images. Men in dark suits peering at freeze-framed ultrasound babies and speculating about just what the abnormalities in the neocortex could mean in terms of cognition. And also what it means that male sexual organs are not developing properly. Sometimes not developing at all. The number of females conceived has apparently risen. Still, I have a feeling you are a boy.
Stop thinking about the future.
Now is all we have, I tell myself. Work on the now, the hereness, the present, the moment of extreme hyperawareness which is also linked to Sera’s most profound mental exercise, her meditation, and which is something I have trouble with. I am more comfortable with the before-ness or the after-ness of life. I am happier dissecting the past or dreading the future. I really have no proficiency at simply experiencing the present. But since the past is so different from the future that to think back at all is like looking down the wrong end of a telescope, and since the future is so disturbing that to give in at all to my imagination is enough to cause a full-blown panic attack, it is really best for our mutual health if I stay focused on what is most immediate. I have to treat myself like a skittish horse. An animal ready to bolt at the sight of the big picture. Stick to the periphery. Pull on a comforting set of blinders.
Hide the liquor.
All I have to do is fit the bottles and the ammunition into the walls of the house, wherever I’ve added the insulation. For the rest of the day, fitting bottles into the walls, boxes of ammunition here and there, screwing the Sheetrock back on with my handy electric drill, I keep thinking about Blessed Mary. I think about her while I tape the seams. Later, I’ll skim-coat the seams. Then repaint. I enjoy doing monotonous home repairs. It’s satisfying. While I seal off the booze I can meditate. I put the cigarettes in plastic tubbies and ease the tubbies into the crawl space behind the boiler. Once I’ve got walls on, I break down the liquor boxes and put them out in the garage, into the recycling, which may never be picked up.
After all of this is done I drive to my usual grocery and am surprised to find it well stocked. I load up on salt, rice, beans, whole wheat flour, pancake mix, lots of canned vegetables, and peanut butter. I also buy luxuries. A bottle of juice, a crisp New Zealand apple, a stack of stoned-wheat crackers, and a ball of mild white mozzarella. At home, I set my treats out on my desk. How long, I wonder, will there be a snack like this to eat—cheese from a cow milked in Italy, crackers packaged in New Jersey, fruit squeezed in Florida, an apple from the other side of the world?
Today’s job is editing the church newsletter. I take a deep breath, and turn on my computer, just for word processing. I feel it is my duty to write for the parish. As I’ve said, I joined the church to make friends, and to bug my parents. But I love my church. It is a humble place—no limestone cathedral, no basilica. It doesn’t even have the name of a saint. It has the name of my present obsession. Holy Incarnation was founded to care for the most destitute people in the city, the cast-asides, the no-goods, the impossible, the toxic and contaminated. It is a small glass and brick and cinder-block place with no convenient parking. It is very different from the exurb Protestant churches that I have also attended, with their vast asphalted lots, their vaults of stone and cement, their jumbotrons up front to show close-ups of the minister. Mine is not a church of the saved, but a church of the lost.
As I am putting together the Thoughts page, my screen goes dark and swirly. This time she floats slowly into focus from the depths.
“Hello, dear. How are you?”
Her full cheeks are cement gray this time, set hard around her smile.
“Mother is thinking all about you. Would you like to tell me about your day?”
I shut down my computer.
My hands are trembling. I push myself away from the dark screen. But I can’t get up. Can’t move. The phone starts ringing, and it won’t quit. It rings continually for ten minutes, then falls silent for a moment, starts again. Twenty-five minutes after the last ring, there is a knock at the door. That is the length of time it takes for your father to get from his apartment to my house, so I know he’s standing on the front steps right now. It is too late to douse the lights. He knows that I am home, and still I sit paralyzed before the dead computer. The door begins to shake. He is rattling the curved metal handle and pounding on the wood. Soon he begins shouting my name. My street is quiet and ends at an old railroad embankment. As I said, it is a forgotten cul-de-sac, a street untouched either by gentrification or destitution. It is not a through street. I am sure my neighbors are peeping from between their blinds or glancing around the sides of their curtains, curious. I leave my office and walk down my dark hall to the door. I stand behind the shaking frame and take about six deep breaths before I can trust myself to talk without my voice shaking or my throat shutting.