Future Home of the Living God(63)

I have a moment of resentment before I remember. We have murdered. We will never be free.

“Come on. Get up and have some soup,” says Sera.

“Are you really okay?” I ask Tia. I sit beside her on one of the big metal drums. My movement sets you into motion, too, and I put my hands upon you as you turn and twist, upend yourself, shoulder me. Then I feel the goodness of you again, the rightness. I’m back. I’m not sure that the sight of me won’t trigger Tia’s feelings. She does look at me a little sadly, but also I can tell that she feels very sorry for me, and worried for me. She is gentle with me—definitely on the other side.

“Don’t you hurt? Aren’t you bleeding?”

“It’s not so bad,” she says. Of course, she didn’t see herself from my perspective, but it seems to me incredible that someone so desperately at the very physical extreme edge of herself should now be sitting at a little table slurping soup. Someone whose baby’s died and . . . but she doesn’t know the rest. While I was sleeping Sera probably took the baby and she buried it or got Shawn to do it. Something. I do not want to know. I know enough. Her baby’s gone and you are here. And I am all around you. I am your home, a land of blood and comfort.

I have never eaten anything as good as that soup. My hunger comes back with the first lovely swallow. Tia and I eat three cans of it before we stop. Sera brews some tea for us—hot raspberry, good for the uterus. My womb is the size of a great big cookie jar, while across from me, Tia’s womb is swiftly shrinking back to the size of a fist. She’ll be able to walk out of here tonight, or rather, tomorrow morning. Three a.m. That’s when we’re leaving. I’ll walk out, too, only trundling you, waddling beneath the cover of darkness. Sera’s telling Tia that they’ve gotten in touch with her husband. Clay apparently kept the faith just like they had planned—stayed home, waiting. He will be parked at the Perkins in St. Louis Park, just off 394. When the recycling truck stops at the Dumpsters, he’ll drive up and get Tia. But she won’t go back to her big house in Minnetonka with the slate steps and entryway floor, the cathedral windows looking out over the water. She won’t sauté onions on her stainless steel range and sleep in her pillow-top-mattressed king-size bed, curled up, a lump in the plush goose-down comforter. She and Clay are going to make a run for California.

The thought of her going fills me like a cry. A confused strangeness chokes me. I can’t look at her now. I’m jealous not only of her freedom, but that she will return to her husband, who has a right to her, while I have no right, being just a friend. I’m just someone who loves her the way you fall in love with someone who has been through life and death with you. I want her to stay with me and look into my eyes when my time comes, like I did with her. I want her to help me have my baby.

Rich thoughts, longing thoughts, stupid thoughts. I can only write them here. After we are finished with the soup and we bring more tea to our sleeping bags, Sera sits with us plotting the outline of our escape. The lamp glows. I know this is a bit foolish, but it seems to me it casts a light that is magical and sweet. For it will be over soon. There is enough heat from the oven to warm our aperture inside the cliff. This is a cozy little spot, a perfect shelter. I could almost believe we were the lost children and the wise queen of a fairy tale were it not for the scrabbling, the constant stream of rat noise, the scritch of tiny claws behind the stone and outside in the corridor and under and all around us. Once in a while, a fight will break out and the rats will screech, high squeals, battling over something. Waves of them across the ceiling, invisible, loud with some excitement. I try not to listen, and do not flinch when Sera glances at me. I asked her to trade her boots for my shoes and she has. She knows the reason.

“I hate rats,” says Tia, hunkering over. But her face has color, energy has restored itself to her skin, her arms. I’m shocked at the resilience of her.

“I don’t mind them,” I say.

I work away on this chronicle that I am writing for you, in spite of you, and for myself, to calm myself. It takes my mind off the rats, off losing Tia, and off our own complicated, harrowing future. Sometimes I wish I was more blunted, that these thoughts and anxieties that bump and twirl around and around in my brain, exhausting me, would quit. I work away on Zeal, again correcting another of my fake priest’s doctrinal examinations of Catholicism and evolution.

Evolution has never been a very controversial part of Catholic discourse, even though the archbishop of Vienna has made some retro noises on the subject. In his 1950 encyclical Humani Generis, Pope Pius XII declared that Catholics would not betray their religion by believing what science has determined about the evolution of the human body just as long as they accepted that God was responsible for infusing that body with a soul. Thinkers like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit and paleontologist, have embraced the concept of evolution as a way to describe the ongoing growth and perfectibility of humanity within the evolving perfection of the cosmos. But we have seemingly reached the end of what Teilhard de Chardin hoped would be our apotheosis. Maybe T. S. Eliot had it right. Our world is ending not with a bang but a puzzled whimper.

I put the work down. All is momentarily quiet. As there has not yet been a chance, I tell Sera that it is time, now, for her to go into detail about what’s happened to Phil.

*

He knew what was happening, she tells me, he knew when it would come. He knew that Bernice would raid my house with her cheery halloo! He knew that she would take me to the hospital in her Camry, and there was nothing he could do about any of it.