Future Home of the Living God(47)
*
And that night, awake, there is a radiance.
Full, soft, startling, the moon hovers right outside the window.
I turn to see whether my roommate is sleeping and find instead that she is sitting up, and moreover, that she is engaged in a very interesting task. She has knotted the ends of thirty or forty strands of yarn together and she holds the knot that they spring from between her slender, bent toes. She keeps the yarn taut with her feet as she leans over the loom of strands that move through her fingers with a mechanical swiftness. She is finger-braiding. Old-time finger-weaving. Grandma Mary Virginia’s trick. An Ojibwe method of creating fancy sashes, wall hangings, belts, tumplines, and ropes.
I get out of bed and walk over to her. Her face tilts up to me, her eyes wide and fathomless. She freezes, waiting. I reach across the covers and touch the sash, then point from her to me, her to me, then I clasp my hands. She nods. When she tires, I start working on the sash and from then on it is the two of us. The two of us against them all.
*
She won’t tell me her name and so after that night I think of her as Spider Nun. Yes, she’s pregnant, but still nunlike to me because she’s so severe. But also potentially a superhero. I do not see exactly how Spider Nun and I will make it out the window, as it doesn’t open but six inches, to let in air. And the only way down is straight down. We are six stories up, but there is another roof three floors beneath us. If we could get out the window, we could tie one end of our sash to the bed and rappel down the side of the building. I can imagine us, I can see us, the moon new as it will be soon, letting ourselves over the lip of the window ledge, slowly walking down the side of the building. I can see it, but I know it will take upper body strength—a problem for pregnant ladies. I look around the room and decide that I will work on my arms, lifting and setting down the chair in the corner, trying to develop enough muscle to enable me to carry, legs against the wall, my 159-plus pounds of self and baby down three stories of brick wall. That is, assuming we can get out the window. Highly doubtful, but then, no other choice presents itself.
So I keep braiding the strands, knotting with careful pressure knots, making the rope as strong as I can. As Spider Nun and I work together, one of us weaves or unravels, just beneath our bedsheets and blanket. The other is at the door, listening closely to every movement in the hallway. By now, I know each one of the nurses and can tell who is coming onto which shift. I know their names and I know as much, from friendly conversations, as they will tell me about their families, lives, origins, daily trials, and moods.
This morning, Orielee’s on. I can tell by the scratching swish of her pressed uniform. She is the only one who actually starches and irons the patterned scrubs that all of the nurses wear. The fabric between her legs rubs noisily as she pads from room to room. The hospital is of course an Internet Use Zone, which means that every nurse who carries a computer has been thoroughly cleared, checked by rigorous security, found by a committee to have done nothing, ever, that could possibly be construed a threat. Orielee has let on that she consented to be investigated. She told me with an almost shy pride that anyone trusted with a computer now and access to the internet has never, ever, expressed what she calls a “new unconstitutional” idea. Has never purchased anything unusual or given any sign of owning an interior life or living by any other set of rules but the given rules. Not that the rules are posted anywhere, or listed, or described. I keep asking her. It seems they are an unspoken set of rules that some people have been living by for years, and others haven’t. And those of us who didn’t are now outsiders. Those who did live by those rules have power, though in many cases it is only a little power—for instance, only the privilege of typing a patient’s vitals twice daily and once nightly into a computer that may or may not have a connection to the world outside of the hospital. I don’t think Orielee is all that high clearance, because she talks a little too much. Today, she tells me about her own daughter’s second pregnancy, about how the family brought her in right away and how her husband got to be with her throughout, how he was even there when she miscarried, “as a lot of these gals do.” Since the baby was born dead, there is no point in asking what happened to the child. Orielee wouldn’t go so far as to tell me what happens to any of the babies. I ask if she has a picture of her daughter’s first baby, and she says, “Not on me.” But then she relents, or is tempted out of sentimental pride, to show me a photograph of her daughter’s first child, her two-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter.
“My only,” she says, “I guess.”
And I jump on that to say, “Wouldn’t they let your daughter keep the baby next time, if she didn’t miscarry? Since she turned herself in right away, I mean? And since the baby’s, you know, so cute?”
Orielee shakes her head, sighs, does not answer.
“Let’s get your blood pressure, hon. Sit still.”
An automatic cuff squeezes my upper arm, holds on for a moment, threatful and impersonal, and then lets go.
“Your pressure’s good, hon.”
“Could you see if I can get my books returned?”
“Sure.”
“Really, could you? I need them. They’re religious.”
“Oh, that’s right. You told me yesterday. I’ll look.”
That’s as much as I dare push. I don’t have much hope. But Orielee surprises me just before she leaves her shift by bringing in my books and setting them down on my bedside table. I am so happy to see my books and even my envelope of the unfinished issue of Zeal that I feel my whole face breaking into a big, fat, beatific smile.