Future Home of the Living God(33)



Except for you. And your baby. I never dream, but I did dream. I dreamed that your baby was fine. Started running as soon as it was born.

So come up here as soon as you can.

I am still doing really well, Cedar, in spite of my worry over you. Please come up here, and stay. Your mom is gone a great deal of the time, as she participates in a round-the-clock camp-out vigil on grass near the shrine. Your saint has recently been sighted, and boy, is she pissed. More on that later. The mail truck comes through the main road once every three days and I’ve got to run to get this on it. Don’t worry, we’re all eating. We’ve moved everything out of the store into our basement and the foodstuffs have a long shelf life (Twinkies approx. forty years). Supersize us! Grandma’s fine and your sister, with no TV to watch, has finished Thus Spake Zarathustra and is immersed in Simone Weil’s biography A Life. Ha, ha. I enclose carbon (!) copies of some recent pages.



Page 3032

Negative Sleep

In the sleep that I do not sleep every night, I find the comfort of mind that enables me not to kill myself throughout the next sleep-tortured day. I call this state of mind, in which I think of sleep but do not actually sleep, negative sleep, for want of a better word. For it is only negative the way a piece of dark film is the shadow image of a photograph—I don’t mean for there to be within the term a value judgment. Especially so because within this dusk of thought, positive sensations bloom. Awake in darkness, I feel the joy of my breath entering and leaving my body without effort. When I match my breath to Sweetie’s slightly clogged exhalations, I become aware of time’s sweet generosity. This is eternity, right here, for eternity is nothing other than awareness of time going by. To lie beside my woman for three hours and fully experience each breath we take together. Bliss. It is the fourth hour that completely sucks. Anxiety worms in. Thoughts of duties tomorrow that will be enlarged by the desperation to rest. Resentment. She sleeps good, why not me? And worse. She rolls over or snorts as I am finally dropping off, causing tears of frustration. The brain starts raving. The brain moves out of its skull and prowls the home looking for a better resting spot.

The floor? The couch?

Only with the greatest of efforts am I able to return to a state of negative sleep, that or a drug. I’ve tried many and some work temporarily but all that are effective are also addictive, and I wish to have but one addiction. Thought. The pleasures of the mind. Thought saves me in the end. I find that if I try to solve some knotty ethical issue or plan the next few pages of my manuscript, the abstract focus triggers a quick avalanche. Slumber hits. As the room brightens I am lulled into a gentler state and by the time Sweetie rises I am nodding off for real. I’m out. If no one wakes me, I can remain comatose for hours. But usually there’s an emergency for me to tend to by nine o’clock. I do often rise in a state of bitterness. But memories of my negative sleep tide me over and I do not kill myself.

PS: Must scrawl this in: Surprise visit from the Nagamojig. Bimibatoog.

I am so excited at receiving a letter from Eddy and by the last line, which I look up in my Ojibwe dictionary and find refers to song—i.e., People who sing; i.e., Songmaker—that I made the mistake of opening it next to the slim rectangle of windows that flank my door on either side. So when the doorbell rings, I automatically look out of the window straight into Hiro’s face. He smiles gravely at me and waves a letter with a green slip stuck to it—apparently I need to sign. I open the door before thinking, then try to shut it, too late. Hiro instantly registers my pregnancy and steps in front of me, anxious that I not be visible from the street. He blocks the door, makes no comment, gives me the letter. It is hand-addressed in writing I do not recognize, and there is no return address.

“Do you know who it is from?” he asks.

When I say that I have no idea, Hiro gently lifts the envelope from my fingers and removes the green slip, then hands back my piece of mail.

“Given your condition, I would advise you not to sign this,” he says. “I’d advise you not to link your name with a physical address. And don’t open your door to anybody else.”

I step back into a safer, shadowy spot in the hallway, and Hiro scans the street.

“I’ll have a letter to mail tomorrow,” I say.

“Put it underneath the mat with nothing sticking out, nothing visible. Tape your dollar onto it. Don’t let anybody see you.”

Hiro lifts his finger up and shakes it.

“Nobody!” he says.

Then Hiro leaves.

I walk back to the kitchen and gaze out into the backyard mindlessly, through the binoculars, then without them, for about an hour. At last I feel a bit less anxious about everything—my parents appearing at Eddy and Sweetie’s on the run, Eddy said in Ojibwemowin. And me stupidly showing myself to Hiro. I am able to make myself a lunch of fresh corn with butter—yes, both are available. I thought this might be the last we’d see of corn—a technology-dependent crop, but as it is genetically enhanced, its whole physical backslide might be very much off. There is no telling. Things aren’t going backward at a uniform or predictable rate at all. Phil has told me that broccoli and cauliflower don’t turn out anymore—he’s talked to someone who says it all comes out a weedy, wild, cabbagey kind of plant. Yet there is corn, and even better, popcorn. Phil found bags of it stuffed under the church kitchen sink, left over from a Good Friday showing of The Passion of the Christ.

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