Future Home of the Living God(38)

Finally, when my exercises are finished, I clean one room of the house besides the kitchen, which I always clean. I just clean one room because I need to rotate them, I need them to actually get dirty. When that’s done, I go to my desk. Ever since I was nearly discovered, I am very cautious about working at my desk by the window. I check the yard through the blinds, I wait, I am patient. I consider moving back into my laundry room, but there is my limit. I can’t do it. If I could not look out on the trees I am sure I would succumb to the fear that’s dogging me. With the window to look out of, I can calm myself enough to work on Zeal, and write to you.



September 16

I have been staring at the back of a square-backed kitchen chair, an old wooden chair painted white, and I have been thinking for some time now thoughts that I cannot believe I am thinking. These are not thoughts I can confide. I cannot talk about them to you. I can’t tell these thoughts to anyone. They return with such persistence that I fear I am losing control over my mind. No, I cannot say them or even describe them, but I wonder, Do you feel them? Do you somehow absorb and sense the content? I hope you don’t, I pray not. I am dangerously imperfect and I would not have these thoughts if I was a better person. I guess that is true enough. But then again, how could I not? Have these thoughts? When I am trapped by the content of my body? By you?



Later on, I decide that maybe I’m not so terrible to want to get rid of you. It is really not you, or me, it is the situation. I forgot. If everything else was predictable, I could accept you, completely. I could. I am sure.



September 17

The borders were sealed off years ago—the border crossings between the United States, or whatever we are now, and Mexico and Canada. Neither of them want us. But illegal as we are, Canada still functions as the escape hatch in the roof of this country, though the fence is well guarded and people are constantly hunted down and returned. There are still many ways to cross, on foot or by boat. I think that is what Sera and Glen have done. Knowing I’m in hiding and worried about being followed, they probably decided not to visit me but instead to go north. I hope they were able to transfer their assets before selective banking started. I hope that I was not alone in thinking to clean out my accounts.

“How much money do we have?” Phil asks.

“People are still using cash?”

“Not always, but it works half the time.”

He’s made the bulk of our cash off selling little jelly packets in the vigorous city street markets.

“A thousand. Plus I bought some cartons of cigarettes.”

Phil’s eyes warm with admiration.

“Cigarettes! I can buy anything with those. People smoke like crazy now.”

I’ve got a thousand counted up, wrapped in the empty freezer, in newspaper. The rest of the money is buried under a flagstone by the back door. Why I don’t tell Phil about all of the money, about the liquor and ammo at that moment, I don’t know. But once I haven’t told him, it is impossible to suddenly tell him. I say nothing.

“We’ve got to keep alert now,” he says.

“I am alert! I’m so alert I can’t stand it!”

Phil puts his arms around me, and says that he’s going to take the money and some cigarettes to buy false identity papers, so we can follow my parents. He repeats, again and again, that I must not go out and I must not for any reason show myself in the doorway. He has come home to find me excited and agitated and walking around an inexcusably messy house—there are things out of place all over—!— “I won’t. Why would I?”

“You’re having trouble.”

I’m not though. He doesn’t see me all day, how hardworking and down-to-earth I’ve been all day. And it isn’t easy with the wind high, with the trees crashing their limbs together out there, with the dry leaves changing color and the sky that hot autumn blue. It is very hard. I want to go out. Couldn’t I just be very fat, or stooped, in a wig of white hair? Couldn’t I just be a potbellied man or a nun? A nun? Of course I could be, and Phil could obtain an old-time habit, couldn’t he? Why couldn’t I go out, then, anywhere, and walk in safety?

“Because,” says Phil, “nuns don’t wear habits very much, or at all, as you know. It would be so obvious, Cedar.”

“I don’t think so, Phil, I really don’t. I’ve seen nuns in habits.”

“Where? I mean besides in a nuns’ nursing home or convent?”

Phil sounds exasperated and I am sorry to cause him any additional anxiety, but I really don’t think that I can bear to live inside for another day.

“Where?” Phil demands.

“Airports.”

“Exactly.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you saw a nun in a habit, she was from somewhere else: Italy or Latin America or, I don’t know, Poland.”

“Is that true?”

“When is the last time you saw a nun in a habit somewhere in the streets, in a normal place?”

I think hard. “Gay pride parade?”

Phil starts to laugh, then he stops with his mouth open and his eyes lose focus, like maybe he’s just remembered those days.

“All right.” I try to stay calm. “I’ll think of something else to wear outside.”

“What, an elephant suit?”