Future Home of the Living God(31)
One pre-dawn, we see the image of Mother fading in and out. She looks haggard, much older, tinged with green like the head of the Wizard of Oz.
“I am back,” she says, glaring exhaustedly up from under her eyebrows. “They failed to destroy Mother. I will always be here for you.”
She licks her dry lips and whispers.
“I wonder if you have the courage to save the country we love. We need you to be a Patriot. We need you to volunteer. If you are a woman, if you are pregnant, go to any of our Future Home Reception Centers. WV. Our chefs are waiting for you!”
I slap the controls and turn to Phil.
“What was that? Volunteer for what?”
“You don’t want to hear,” he warns, as usual.
“Tell me.”
“It’s about frozen eggs and sperm. There are special centers.”
“With chefs?”
“And even better, actual food.”
“What’s this WV?”
“Womb Volunteers. Listen.”
On the radio someone describes a raid on an in-vitro clinic by members of some militant organization we’ve never heard of. They plan to use one thousand Womb Volunteers to gestate the embryos they’ve liberated from that clinic’s deep freeze. There is crackling. A sudden interruption and a young woman’s voice.
“We took the leftovers. The embryos not labeled Caucasian. We’re going to have them all and keep them all. We’re not killing any. All are sacred.”
The news report goes on, ducks are not ducks and chickens are not chickens, insects are nutritious, and there are ladybugs the size of cats.
September 1
Further description: My backyard’s unused rail spur has not yet been converted to bicycle trail. That in turn merges with an overgrown and half-abandoned shipping yard and several acres of city park that lead to a corridor of wildness, ravine, tangled groves of grapevine-throttled trees, and an abrupt drop down a steep bank to the soggy headlands of a serene, almost hidden lake. Because of the luck of this convergence, I have always seen an unusual number of birds and animals for a person who lives in the city. Now that I cannot go out of my house, I spend my time near the window most private, the lavish rectangle of glass that looks out into my backyard. I set up a desk underneath the window where I can write to you every day, and because I’m there so much, I see the birds that come to feed on the purple fruit of two large mulberry trees. I’ve often thought of cutting down these trees. They drop buckets of berries in the grass and all August the yard smells like wine. Now I’m glad I didn’t. Maybe next year, if there is one, I can dry the berries out. Maybe I can gather them at night. I see squirrels flow up and down the oak tree that might provide, come to think of it, an emergency source of food in the fall if I can figure out what to do with the acorns. The friendly squirrels. I’ll plug them with the Custer’s Last Stand Tribute Rifle. Occasionally, a deer wanders in. I see rabbits, chipmunks, several varieties of woodpecker, neighborhood cats, finches, robins, nuthatches, sparrow, ravens, crows, and my favorite bird, the chickadee. There’s a garter snake living under some rocks piled in the corner of the yard. I’ve seen a fox, rats, ducks, and a wild turkey. I suppose that I see more animals than my neighbors to either side because they’ve got strict, tight chain-link fences at the borders to the railroad land.
Today I see something I have never seen before. A bird about the size of a hawk swoops off the oak, down into the mulberry branches, and then hops about among the leaves. Its tail is very long, and it seems to clutch at the bark and twigs with claws poking from the hinge of its wings, like a large bat. I glimpse its head—beakless, featherless, lizardlike, rosy red. The feathers are a slate blue with black tips. The bird, or whatever it is, seems to be eating both fruit and the insects that would be hovering around the tree and crawling on its bark. A graceful thing with fluid, darting movements, it behaves exactly like a lizard-bird. It is captivating. I find the folding binoculars and watch it for as long as I can. In spite of what this tells me about the fate of living creatures and the world in general, I am lost in contemplation. I have that sense of time folding in on itself, the same tranced awareness I experienced in the ultrasound room. I realize this: I am not at the end of things, but the beginning.
*
I spend the rest of the day oddly jubilant. I do my exercises, read my books. The day goes quickly, and I use some hot sauce Phil brought to spice up a Thai noodle and peanut butter dish for our dinner. We shut the curtains and eat by candlelight, not only because it’s romantic, but in case anybody tries to look in the window. I show Phil the drawing I’ve made in your notebook/letter.
“Archaeopteryx or something like it, probably not the actual transitional organism, but some species very close. Maybe Confuciusornis. Did you see its mouth clearly? Did it have teeth?”
Phil is helplessly excited, the way I am, and after we eat and even though it’s dusk, he sits in the backyard waiting for the bird to appear. He says that other people have heard of sightings, here and there, of unusual animals. He says, haltingly, that some scientists have been tinkering with genetic repairs.
“What’s that mean?”
“I don’t know if it’s with plants? Animals? People? Or maybe it’s with the babies. Why they’re keeping some of the pregnant women cloistered.”
“Cloistered sounds bad.”