Future Home of the Living God(44)
My heart squeezes and pumps with an uncontainable energy, a useless urge to rush to him and comfort him and have him save us, too, by the way.
My roommate’s blanket is completely unraveled and she has a couple of huge balls of yarn hidden in the undercarriage of her bed. The nurse brings her another blanket, then leaves two more when—with a delicate sneeze and a sweet smile, a mimed shiver —my roommate indicates that she is cold. For a moment, I think she’s in her right mind, but then as soon as we are alone again she works obsessively to pick apart a beginning point on one of the new blankets. Soon she begins unraveling it exactly like the first.
I’m going to have to plot my way out. I wish Agnes had left the name of what must have been a helpful nurse, the other outlaw, she said. I don’t know how to find the nurse except to talk to all of the nurses. Get to know them. Engage them personally, make friends with them if I can. So on the fourth day after Agnes either escapes or dies, I rouse myself and begin to walk the corridors; it’s exercise anyway, and rocks you to sleep. You’re very active now, twisting, bumping me hard. I need to walk in order to calm these frequent attacks of fear and adrenaline that overwhelm me when I think of what will happen to you, or think of what has already happened to Phil.
I keep imagining him walking into the house and not finding me there. I imagine his rough cries. I know exactly how his face would look, registering disbelief, then growing knowledge, then a kind of unsettled anger, at first frantic and then resolute. He’s going to find me, I think that he already knows where I am. There will be a sign. I must stay ready for the sign, remain alert, prepare myself, stay strong. So I drink the powdered OJ and eat the rancid eggs, the strange bread, the curdled milk, and the coffee-type beverage so acidic it brings tears to my eyes. I eat the bean paste and slimy orange slices, the wads of wet Kleenex that are supposed to be mashed potatoes, and I walk up and down the one corridor, observing the routine, looking for a hole in the day.
October 8
I continue to make light chat with the nurses—and I ask the one nurse who has stayed clear of me, stayed behind the desk, in fact, if she knows where Agnes Starr went. I have already nicknamed this nurse the Dweeb. She’s a pale, skinny, chinless, thick-eyeglass-wearing nerdy type of woman. She is unnoticeable, really, as manila as her stacks of folders. But when I ask her my question, “Where did Agnes Starr go?” she blinks at me, draws closer, looks at me carefully, waits for another nurse to leave the desk, then tells me the truth.
“They cornered her in the lobby, took her down. Knocked her out, solid. Agnes never made it off the delivery table.”
I stand there looking at the nerd-nurse, the Dweeb, who calmly regards me, her washed-out eyes now steady behind her thick, round, Coke-bottle-bottom eyeglasses.
“You’re the one who tried to help her.”
“I’m Jessica, they call me Jessie.”
“The other outlaw.”
“Whatever. You can’t talk to me again, you’ll blow things.”
“But I need your help, please. I’ve got to get out.”
“Yes,” says the mousy, bland, limp-haired, and cave-chested woman, her voice brightening to a false luster as another nurse approaches, “I’m working on that. Believe me, I really am.”
I turn away.
“You’re all alike,” I say to the other nurse. “She wouldn’t let me use the phone.”
“You know there’s no phone service,” says the nurse in a melting, soothing, frightful voice. “Let’s go back to your room, shall we, and see if we can put a movie in for you.”
I follow her back to my room and don’t watch one of the movies from the little library—The Bells of St. Mary’s. The nurse puts it in, but I keep my eyes on my hands. The movie is cover, allowing me to think. For the next few hours I sit picking apart my waffle-weave blanket, reducing it the way my roommate is doing, to an angry ball of yarn. As I wind the string, I begin to talk and then just keep talking, why not? I’m sure my roommate doesn’t understand me, but I’ve got to hear somebody talking, a voice, some form of understanding, even if it’s only myself.
“You and me could be related,” I say to her. “Have you ever heard of the Bering Strait? The land bridge theory?”
My roommate just keeps picking at her blanket and smiles gently at me. She feigns listening politely, and I somehow appreciate that. I notice that she uses a square knot when she pieces together stretches of yarn. On my walks, I take dirty blankets from the hampers in the hallway, bundle them under my robe, next to you. If she’s up to something, I want to be working with her. So now I’m picking my own blanket apart just the way she does. Talking to her.
“We possibly share the major DNA haplotype B marker found in most American Indians as well as people in Ulaanbaatar,” I tell my roommate. She gives a tiny, polite, oh-you-don’t-say smile. “Not that all Native views coincide here, mind you, there are plenty of people who believe that their particular tribal origin spot—hill, lake, cave, mountain—is the real place they emerged from. As much as I’d like to believe the same, I was raised with a reductionist worldview and think at least some of our people came across the land bridge in a steady migration, a trickle really, for tens of thousands of years. Then there were the people who navigated the sea to South America. And the ones who dropped from the stars. Over a hundred million of us until de Soto’s pigs got loose, Pizarro coughed, Captain John Smith sneezed. All that. Diseases killed ninety-nine percent of us. Of course, your and my families lost touch over time.”