Future Home of the Living God(41)



Phil steps behind the computer, jerks it up, and smashes it on the tile counter. But it won’t disintegrate.

“Please get in touch with Mother. Please get in touch,” it says, in pieces on the floor.





Part II



September 27

Fairview Riverside Hospital, Room 624

They have us. We are alone together now and I have only the barest idea what their plans are for us—though I assume not good, I know not good, and a trembling, low-down, crazy, stark anxiety pulls my every nerve. Here is what happened. We were raided, I suppose you’d say. Though there was no physical violence. Phil was gone and there wasn’t any use I could see in putting up resistance. Even now, that I went willingly almost confuses me. The guns were loaded. I could have run to the bedroom as the woman entered the kitchen door. I could have locked myself in and sat on the bed with the Rossi in one hand and the Bushmaster balanced on my arm. I could have made a stand, gone down fighting, at least kicked and clawed. But number one, you would have died with me or at the very least been hurt. I’ve never actually fired either one of those guns, and probably would have screwed up the action. Number two, there would have been no point. And number three, I have this weakness. Nice people paralyze me. Dark-skinned people who are nice, especially. The woman who tapped lightly on the door after she had picked the lock, then opened the door and poked her head around it with a cheery halloo! was round and honey-brown, all sorts of pretty, a mixture of several races. Her face was delicately freckled and her straightened auburn hair was curled softly and sprayed away from her forehead and cheeks in a Betty Crocker halo. She wore jeans, Keds, and a raspberry cotton tunic sweater. She wore a few pieces of clean, contemporary, tasteful gold jewelry, and she carried a covered basket.

That the basket held a handgun beneath the red and white checkered napkin was something I didn’t learn until I had compared notes with my roommate. Bernice had come for her, too. Only my roommate had put up a struggle and her boyfriend had charged Bernice, who slipped the gun from underneath the checkered napkin and fired, twice. She said Bernice had stepped aside and let the boyfriend crash into the stove, turning over hot soup, which he hadn’t reacted to, falling, so she thought he was dead. “She killed one of her own,” my roommate mourned. “She murdered my beautiful black boyfriend. So I know they won’t fucking let me keep my baby.” Bernice handcuffed and led my roommate out while she was in shock, so she didn’t know for sure. She keeps repeating the story.

“She had me out the door before I could go to him. You know, she’s a trained police officer, former U.S. Marine, or some shit.”

I’m so glad your father wasn’t home.

Who turned me in? Who tipped off Bernice? I keep wondering if it could have been Hiro. Or maybe the coral-shirted boys, Clark and Emeric, who dropped the invitation off. Little Mary. I suppose it could have been Little Mary. So anxious to get rid of me. Yet, I cleaned her room! In fact, the more I think about it, the easier it is to convince myself that it was definitely my sister, jealous, lying, high or enraged, my sister who called the tip-line, the UPS line, Unborn Protection Society, and offered the following information about me. Cedar Hawk Songmaker. Pregnant. 119 Boutwell Street (Proverbs 10:7), Minneapolis, Minnesota. And had them dispatch Bernice.

After Bernice radioed her backup help—a UPS truck—that I was cooperating nicely, she sat down with me and talked to me. She listened to my arguments, waited while I told her all of the reasons I was afraid to go along with her in . . . not a squad car. She drives a very clean silver Camry fixed in just one way. The seat belts lock automatically and only unlock when hers is released. This is another fact I would not have known had not my roommate ridden in the Camry, too, and tried to leap out at an intersection.

My roommate’s name, by the way, is Agnes Starr. She insists that her great-great-grandmother was Belle Starr, the famous outlaw, and that she’s going to break out of the hospital. I’m going with her, even though I’m surprised to find that this place, the maternity ward, is so orderly and shiny, so pleasant. The food is not standard hospital fare but much better. I feel at home here. On some level I don’t want to leave. We’re on the sixth floor and as we’re on a hill, our window has a gorgeous view of the eastern side of the city and the Mississippi River. We can see people crossing the University of Minnesota bridge, little people’s heads bobbing to and fro. I guess maybe they are even still going to school. Or they could be soldiers. There is another rooftop, three, four floors beneath us, and another and another roof, all various heights. Beyond us, trees and more bunches of trees glowing in fall colors all along the river. Russet, hot yellow, pink, orange, and deep bloody red. The thing is, I don’t think the leaves had changed yet when I was captured. They were green, a few were yellow. I am paranoid that I’ve been asleep for weeks, but I’m no bigger. A nurse told me the date. I try to think of another explanation, but soon lose the thread of my thoughts. I watch the sun rise each morning, lighting the steel beams of the bridge, touching the brick walls with hands of fire, passing bars of radiance along the gravel and the asphalt toppings on the roofs below. As the warmth advances, mist lazily floats from the still, green leaves of far-off bushes and giant trees, and swirls in the scarlet and green maples, dogwood, viburnum. The elms are turning gold and come to think of it they must be giving me drugs.

My experiences are enchantingly visual and spookily intense.

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