Future Home of the Living God(29)

“Guess not,” I said, back then, staring into his eyes.

“Guess not,” he answered, staring into mine.



August 29

I am typing late into the night, trying to keep myself from logging on to the internet, when Phil taps at my window. I run to open the door and in stumbles Phil with two Cub shopping bags and a loaded, beat-up black backpack. He’s unshaven and weary, his eyes are bloodshot with exhaustion, and his hair is stiff with dirt. I sit him at the table and pour him a glass of water. He tells me that there’s no food in the stores. Everybody figured out all at once that there would be a food shortage, so people are hoarding food, stocking up. The supermarkets are open at weird hours, whenever some shipment comes in.

“Where did you get this?” I rummage in the bags. “Peanut butter! Mixed cocktail nuts. Granola, peas, corn, crackers, more peanut butter. Baked beans.”

“Church basement,” Phil says. “Left over from funeral and wedding meals. There’s more in the car.”

“Potted cheese.”

“Nothing fresh, but they are selling fresh stuff in the streets here and there, I mean it’s August. The farmers’ market is going, I’ve heard. It’s not that there’s no food right now, but there’s panic about the long term.”

“We should get fresh stuff. I’ll dry it, can it, freeze it. Do you think there will be electricity?”

“I don’t know. Nobody knows.”

Phil is quiet, drinking his water, gulping it, nervous.

“And why were you gone such a long time?”

Phil draws me onto his lap and I lean against him. Then he tells me there’s a complete news blackout now—no newspapers, no television, radio extremely sketchy. Nobody knows exactly what is happening. There are news kiosks all through the city where people congregate to share rumors. He was gone a long time because he bought a lot of guns. There is nothing to say after the phrase a lot of guns.

“I’ve got them locked in the trunk. I backed up onto the lawn. I thought I should tell you about them before I brought them in.”

I slide off Phil’s knees and walk around the kitchen, straightening and arranging my yellow and white checkered curtains, which slide together on fake brass rods. The thing about the guns is just incomprehensible. It’s as if Phil told me he had a rhinoceros on a leash out there. My family has never owned a gun or had one in the house; we support several campaigns to end gun violence. We are not the kind of liberals who make big noises about how we aren’t the namby-pamby knee-jerk types and how much we like our weapons. We are firm. I had assumed that Phil thought like me.

“We can’t have guns in here,” I say to him.

“I don’t want to either,” Phil says. “But sooner or later it’s going to come to that. They’re offering rewards now for anyone who turns in a pregnant neighbor, acquaintance, family member, whatever. There’s billboards. Ads up on lampposts. It’s true.”

My brain is buzzing. My voice is tiny.

“What are they doing with all of the women?”

“I don’t know.” Phil stands up and holds me against him.

“What are they doing, Phil? You know something. . . .”

“Word is . . .” He doesn’t want to say.

“Tell me.”

So he does tell me. All of the prisoners in the country have disappeared. Most people say they have been euthanized. Or freed, which Phil doesn’t believe. The prisons are for women.

“I thought the hospitals . . .”

“Those too.”

“What about the babies?”

He keeps holding me, won’t look at me. I can feel his heart pound. After a while he whispers.

“They keep some of them.”

“Some?”

I keep standing in his arms, but my knees are turning weak and beginning to shake. Pretty soon he is holding me up. His face is in my hair and I can feel how tired he is from the sag of his shoulders. But when he speaks he seems angry—not exactly with me but he is looking at me when he talks, voice shaking.

“It’s like they said it would be, Cedar. Don’t you remember?”

“No!”

“They have a registry, Cedar. Remember?”

“No.”

“How can you have missed it? You went to the doctor.”

“My doctor let me go. I told you. And stop glaring at me.”

“Yeah.” He looks down at his feet. Speaks to the floor like a sullen teenager. He smells like sullen teen too—rancid sweat, old clothes, gasoline.

I turn away and focus on what I remember about the ultrasound doctor and his questions. Did he mutter something? There was more, I was sure of it, there was more. We’ve got one, he said. The sudden meaning of the words stops me from repeating them. He said the measurements were right, I think. But We’ve got one seems to mean the opposite.

You kick and roll. You are agitated. I decide that I have to calm down because I don’t have the fortitude right now. I can’t take another shock. It is hurting you.

“That’s okay. I’ve had enough.” I concentrate on the gasoline smell on his clothing.

“You got gas, too,” I say.

“What there was of it. I pumped it into some plastic jugs because I think it’ll get siphoned from the cars. Neither of us has a locking gas cap. We should park the cars around the back of the house.”