Future Home of the Living God(50)

“Ow!”

“Ow, what?”

“The baby just kicked me real hard. Ow! Again! Feel!”

The Slider comes to me and bends over my bed. She moves her stiff, hard little hand across my belly. Pauses. I feel you shrink away from her hand—so dry, white, and cold. Meanwhile, Spider Nun creeps from the bed, following the unrolling ball of cotton yarn. It meanders between our two beds and then stops just behind the Slider’s feet.

“I don’t feel anything,” the Slider says.

“Wait! Here!”

Obligingly, you shift and turn. I yell again.

“That’s normal.” She sneers. “You’re full of juice today, aren’t you, dear. If you can’t calm down, I’ll be glad to order you a sedative. Would you like me to put a request in to your doctor?”

“Who is my doctor?” I ask.

Spider Nun has crept behind her, and now snatches up the yarn. I grab the Slider’s hand.

“Don’t worry,” I cry out, passionately. “Really, I’m fine.”

She wrests her hand away. Whirls around. Spider Nun’s back in bed, covered up, looking indeterminately sad. She has this profound, tragic, silent stare that she sometimes directs into space and from which she will not be distracted. The Slider doesn’t even try. She just gathers up all of our body samples and departs. We turn off the penguin channel and drowse, waiting to see if she returns. We sleep an hour, two. We need to sleep during the day so that we can stay up weaving all night.



October 14

We are at twenty feet now, and you’re getting so big that I’ve got to get out of here. You’re pushing on my lungs, and I’m breathing hard and quick. If I don’t move around enough, one side of my butt goes numb. Got to leave! We measured our rope last night by laying out the rope on the floor—I have size-ten feet and can pretty well work out the length by walking the rope. I figure that we want twelve feet for each story, and an extra eight for the piece we tie to the bed legs. There can’t be much of a drop at the end. We can’t afford too much of a jolt, we are afraid of hurting our babies. At least, I assume that Spider Nun feels the same as me.



Orielee comes in and wakes me for another ultrasound but first she takes my blood. I get my blood drawn every day, but Spider Nun gets hers taken twice a day, which alarms me. She’s so small that it seems to me that she must need every drop she’s got.

“I don’t mind having my blood drawn,” I say to Orielee as she ties an amber rubber tourniquet around my upper arm and snaps at my veins, to make them rise, “but can’t you say something about my roommate? She’s getting her blood drawn twice a day. It’s too much! And anyway, what are they doing with all of this blood? Drinking it?”

“Well, I guess they’re checking it,” says Orielee. “And yeah, it says here I’m supposed to do her. Poor little thing, says here she’s not gaining a bit of weight. It does seem like a lot.”

Orielee bites her lip and shakes her head as she looks at Spider Nun, but her sympathy is so exaggerated it seems false.

“Why don’t you just take a little extra from me,” I say, “and leave her alone? Can’t you see how weak she’s getting?”

Orielee sighs and presses the needle in. She’s very good, and does it so lightly that it hardly hurts.

“That’s sure nice of you, but I can’t do that.”

“But she’s getting weak!”

“And between you and me,” says Orielee, “I’ve seen where some of this blood we take they never even look at.”

“You mean it goes to waste? Nobody even drinks it?”

“I shouldn’t say, but yeah, I mean no. It goes to waste. Still, I could lose my job substituting blood, and sometimes they do check.”

“Who’s they?”

“Researchers.” She gestures vaguely out the window, toward the bridge over the Mississippi where all day people are still passing between the campuses.

“The U’s still going?”

“Most things are still going,” says Orielee. “But they’re making lots of different rules. New rules all of the time. A person has to be so careful.”

“Not to break the rules?”

“Yes.”

I rush into a set of lies.

“And sometimes you don’t even know what they are! Like me, I didn’t know I was supposed to turn myself in, I had no idea.”

“How couldn’t you?” Orielee seems astonished. “It was all over the place, still is. Ads, even billboards and stuff. You couldn’t miss it!”

“Yes, you could,” I lie some more. “I don’t read the papers and don’t watch the news. I was happy, but I was sick a lot, too, so I stayed indoors or sat out on the porch. People saw me all of the time and nobody said anything. Nobody turned me in.”

“Well . . .” She looks at me doubtfully.

“Well, what? I mean, they just came and got me. But nobody actually turned me in, I don’t think.”

“They . . .”

Orielee’s eyes are very round and maybe even a bit teary at the corners. She wants to tell me something.

“Maybe . . . ,” she softly says. I wait. She takes a deep breath and looks quickly at the door, then at Spider Nun, who is sitting straight up in her bed with her eyes closed, apparently meditating.