Future Home of the Living God(49)
“Oh, she’s good,” he says. I’ve asked his name, but he won’t tell me. Still, I continue to believe that he is sympathetic to us and that we might test his sympathies even further somehow—without endangering our plan. He works nights next week and might look the other way. He might, at least, go along with a diversion when we break the glass of our window. I do not have a plan for how we’re going to do that, exactly. I’m not sure that anything that my roommate and I can actually lift together is heavy enough to shatter that window. It is not, however, a part of the plan that we can try out beforehand.
Our friend pushes the canvas-bag-hung laundry cart just outside the door to the room, and brings out an armload of dirty sheets, pillowcases, and blankets. With a polite gesture to me, he leaves the blankets on top, then goes back into the room. Geri is on her way down the hall, though. She pauses, her brown eyes lowered conscientiously to her computer. She goes into a patient’s room, but the hall is still not safe. Farther down, a couple of nurses are immersed in a conversation. One nurse I do not know, and the other I call the Slider. She is the most dangerous of all of them, the sneakiest; I never hear her footsteps, only a sliding hiss as she enters the room.
I must keep walking. I can’t appear to hover near the laundry cart. I step toward the two nurses, holding a hand to the small of my back, as though I’ve got the usual pregnant-lady backache, though I’m lucky and do not. The Slider notices me and turns to her fellow nurse—obviously they’ve been discussing a patient, a procedure, something I am not meant to hear. They watch me pass. The Slider’s eyes are deep-set and shiny as black ants. The nurses resume their conversation, then halt abruptly when I turn and walk by them again. I smile, moan a little, holding my back, take another turn, walk away. Impatient, they let themselves into the nurse’s pantry, where they keep a refrigerator full of snacks, a machine that sometimes produces ice, and a warming oven that keeps blankets heated up for those who are soon to deliver their babies.
The corridor is now empty and I make my move. I control my walk and approach the cart at a normal pace, recheck the hallway quickly, snatch two blankets, and ball them under my arms and against you. My heart rate goes up and I feel a buzz. You kick, hard. I waddle back to my room, enter, pull the privacy curtain, and stuff one of the blankets beneath my roommate’s sheet. Spider Nun smiles in excitement, her teeth even and white as a little girl’s milk teeth. At once, she begins her work of undoing. I settle into my bed and beneath the screen of the other blanket I start unraveling.
Winding yarn reminds me of my knitting days at Waldorf school, and how we learned to neatly ball up the yarn and undo the skeins, how it felt to knit all together in a room, singing, in our classroom with the fairy-pink walls and rosette ceiling. I made a scarf. I think Sera’s still got it—she was thrilled that I’d made it of her favorite color at the time. Black. They let a child knit with black! It looks so pretty with her pale hair. Now it is surely put away somewhere, in our house which is inhabited by the people who did things properly in the world as it was before, and who have inherited it now. While we are working, we keep the television off so that we can listen for people approaching in the hall. Spider Nun has a watch and soon indicates that lunchtime has arrived. We put away our work and pretend to be absorbed in a show I’ve clicked on—a continuous tape of a documentary movie about the reproductive lives of penguins—which we’ve seen already dozens of times. When lunch comes, we eat it all, swiftly, trying to absorb nutrition before we actually taste the food. I take the trays back out to the lunch cart and we return to our room. The bustle of lunch subsides. We wait for a vitals check. The Slider enters, her feet sighing along the floor. Her flossy brown hair is set in Victorian doll ringlets around a wrathful, pinched face. When she speaks I am so frightened I’ll betray something that I fix my eyes on her hard lipsticked orange mouth. Her thin shoulders hunch and her glittery black eyes drill me. Even her voice sounds clenched. She takes our pulse, blood pressure, temperature, all in silence, now, frowning. Blood samples. Urine samples. All collected. She decides for some reason to check the pupils of our eyes with a little flashlight, and to take bits of nail clippings. She snips a strand of hair from each of our heads and seals it into an envelope, fills out a label on the envelope.
“So what are you taking all of these little bits for?” I can’t help asking. “Are you making voodoo dolls?”
The Slider’s eyes go harder, trying to squash me, but I fade away, intentionally lose focus.
“Or maybe you’re putting together a Frankenwoman. Is it a cloning thing? C’mon, these are my bits. I want to know!”
She ignores me, which is good, I shouldn’t speak at all. Try to stay inconspicuous. Draw no attention. Don’t laugh. She asks the usual questions about fetal movement, and carefully records my answers. Spider Nun doesn’t say a word, but the Slider jots things down anyway. All of a sudden, the Slider jerks back Spider Nun’s bedcovers, as if she’d find a baby hidden there! I hold my breath, sure she’ll find the half-picked-apart blanket. But my roomie has cleverly positioned the blanket underneath the top, intact, waffle-weave blanket, and the blankets stick together. There is nothing out of the ordinary. Panicked anyway, I pretend I’m sleepy and yawn, then cry out to distract the Slider.
“Is it normal to sleep all of the time like this?” I ask her. As she turns to answer me, the ball of yarn Spider Nun was just working on slowly rolls from under her pillow and bounces off the bed, then begins to roll across the floor toward the Slider’s feet. I yell up at the ceiling.