Future Home of the Living God(32)
My heart strikes hard, alarm bells, and immediately I try to forget what he said. Phil goes on talking.
“Every service system seems controlled by a separate group. Every city service negotiates with other services. People are forming their own civilian militias, their own rescue posses, hiding pregnant women. Nobody knows anything for sure though. The first thing that happens at the end of the world is that we don’t know what is happening.”
Later, from my window, I watch Phil sitting at the edge of the yard with my binoculars in his lap. From time to time he lifts them and eagerly searches the tops of the oak and mulberry trees. His shoulders are rounded and powerful, his bluntly cropped head of black hair is all ruffled up. He has a passionate mouth, a long, straight nose. His entire being is presented to me unself-consciously, and I find him irresistible to watch. Looking at your father floods me with tenderness. Little being; here we are. It is week 23 and your lungs are getting their surfactant. You’re making breathing movements for practice, and you could just barely survive in a NICU, but the blood vessels in your brain are so delicate that you could have a hemorrhage, especially deep in the middle of your brain, the germinal matrix, so you’re much better off with me. Next week you’ll get your inner ear for balance. As for me, I’m getting milk. I’m getting ready for you. And I must tell you, since we’ll be in hiding once you’re here, I suppose, that I haven’t done badly today with being stuck indoors. Sometimes I’m good at living within limitations. Besides, after all is dark and silent in the street, we go out, all three of us.
Our street never was brightly lighted, and now a few lamps have sputtered out. The light doesn’t penetrate at all into the woods, which is where we go. A small path I know winds through the trees, and once the moon is up we can see just faintly enough to make our way.
As we walk along the inky path, taking small steps, shuffling, we hear noises to every side. Small rustlings, scurrying sounds, odd hoots, now, and bitter coughs of night animals. Phil has one of the guns, and even so, we’re nervous. But to be outside and freely walking together is a pleasure so intense I feel everything too much—the slight movement of air on my face, the softness of duff, the terrain of bark under my hands, the touch of leaves against my clothing, my skin. It all fills me with a charmed awareness. I slide a black leaf between my fingers, tracing the rigid vein up the middle. I gulp the darkness in, the rich turmoil of earth.
September 3
The United States Postal Service has apparently conducted secret negotiations with the National Guard and they’ve formed a joint entity within some states. Each state, that is, which has decided not to answer to the central government, which may not exist, which may be one of the supercorporate entities who have hired the contract mercenary armies that have no country but green money. The entire mail operation is funded by the cash exchange between the customer and the mail carrier. The postal worker takes the cash and pays the National Guard outright for protection, keeping a salary, too. It costs a dollar to mail each letter. Mail service has become the only reliable form of long-distance communication, and everyone uses it now. There are two deliveries a day. It is a quiet morning. I have been awake through dawn, listening to the low and secret calls of the doves in the trees behind the house. There is no wind and the leaves are perfectly still. Phil is gone. I used to know most of the bird cries, but now there are new sounds in the leaves. Some are menacing and dry, others are ravishingly sweet, both familiar and alien.
There is the sudden growl of a motor—a very loud truck. I lift the side of a curtain to see that the mail is being delivered.
An armored personnel carrier prowls the street. A soldier perches behind a mounted swivel machine gun and two others beside him carry assault weapons. Wearing the same dull blue uniform that he always did, plus a helmet and bulletproof vest, our neighborhood postal carrier steps from the passenger’s side of the vehicle. He is a wiry, pleasant Korean-American man whose smile puts soft crinkles into his face. His name is Hiro. He begins to walk his usual route, absorbed in what he has sorted, making certain that names match with addresses, flipping the envelopes along his arm. On the street beside him, the soldiers are alert, scanning the rooftops, swiveling their gun side to side, addressing large handheld telephones that might be old-fashioned walkie-talkies.
I retreat into the living room, sit down in the old green armchair in the corner, and wait. The mail fits through a brass slot in the panel next to the front door. From my chair, I can just see the basket into which it will fall. As I am waiting for Hiro to turn down my sidewalk, walk up my front steps, and drop the mail in the slot, I can hear the tiny gears edge the kitchen clock’s big hand forward. In the tree out back, the mourning dove calls again. The truck’s motor turns over, rumbles forward, pitches. You kick. Hiro’s footsteps approach. He drops the mail into my house and turns away. I used to chat with Hiro when he’d bring the mail, and I suddenly feel the silence. I get out of my chair and walk over to the door, pick up the mail. There are two envelopes of appeals, one from Holy Seal and one from Children’s Way, another three are bills, which I suppose I still have to pay. There are two papers that may or may not fit the theme of the current Zeal. And there is a letter from Eddy.
Dear Cedar,
Things up here are interestingly chaotic. We’ve had to barricade the store, as there has been looting. Our tribe has formed a militia quartered at the casino. Quite a number of us see the governmental collapse as a way to make our move and take back the land. Right now, nobody gives a rat’s ass what we do. Still, I hate to say this, but in a generation it won’t matter. That’s the truth of the situation. The wealthiest will get ahold of the technology to reproduce and those few Homo sapiens—at most a couple hundred thousand as there are half a million frozen U.S. embryos and not all of them will take—those few people will own the rest of us, the monkeys.