Future Home of the Living God(64)
Three women were living in the basement of our church. He was sheltering them; other parishioners were helping. Three women I knew from church, two of them with husbands and one with a boyfriend who deserted her. Phil was running back and forth between the church and me. The women in the basement were caught when a neighbor noticed number 10 cans of beans delivered to the back door of the kitchen entryway and nobody brought them in. So she did. Then heard voices. Then heard nothing. Before they even knew she’d found them out, a retrofitted UPS van was pulling up beside the church. The church was raided, and Phil was taken into custody by very friendly people. The women were taken to the hospital—a different one than mine. Nobody knows what became of the women.
Phil was housed in the Fifth Precinct police station, where he was nicely treated, fed, warm, interviewed for two days. He was asked many times about the whereabouts of other women and he always said that the only ones he was helping were the women in the church basement. On the third day he was taken downtown, to the basement of City Hall, an ornate old brownstone building with a clock tower and a couple of blocks all to itself. City Hall is now the headquarters of the Unborn Protection Society. The old UPS trucks haul people there for questioning. They still have the phone number to call on the back of the truck, the 800 number, which is what the neighbor used. Phil was interviewed at the old City Hall and then sent out to the UPS offices in Burnsville, where he was scheduled for a truth seminar.
These truth seminars can only be administered by ordained ministers and overseen by the military. They are conducted according to certain laws—precedents set by the church a few centuries back have come in handy.
Sera becomes agitated. She can’t speak. She begins to weep as she talks.
The only people who really know the definition of torture are the ones being tortured, she says. It is useless, hideous, to ask the torturers to define the act. Unless, of course, they agree to undergo what they define, they have no authority in the matter. No academic degree means anything. No doctorate. No lawyer’s shingle. No education. No citing of precedents or principle. The only thing meaningful in the definition is the word made flesh. The body has the last and only word. So when Phil told Sera very simply that he was tortured he was saying that he was sorry. Sorry that his body had reacted and given up my name and address.
“Don’t blame him,” says Sera.
“Well, duh,” I say, looking at her. “He’s a human being.”
She is silent, looks down at her hands, so I know that she knows. She will tell me everything that happened to Phil if I ask, but I am not going to ask.
October 23
Sera and I hook Tia’s jolly, pink, padded, chubby arms in our arms. Tia’s much better but we don’t want her to bleed again. We proceed very slowly. I’m feeling fine—the soup brought me back. I’m short of breath but have recovered most of my energy. I feel strong, and although I’m shielding my heart from the thought of Phil, he’s there. He’s drawing us toward him, I can feel it. Once we’re out of the tunnel, through the abandoned house, we make our way back along the chain link to Shawn’s truck. Once again, we’re stuffed behind the seat with old boots, clipboards, oil cans and wrenches and sandwich wrappers. We’re taking 494, then we’ll run up 100 to 394 and over to Louisiana Avenue. There, we’ll drop Tia at the Perkins. Once she’s safe, we’ll head back to the city and drive to the post office building. Sera and I will be dropped off there to stay in a safe room until we hitch north on the postal truck. As we jolt along I hold Tia against me. She’s weakened from the walk and maybe bleeding slightly again. It seems to me that the brash energy she felt at first has gone out of her. She sinks against me with a gray grief that she knows her husband will not understand. I am the only one who does, or can, the only one marked in the same way by what happened to us. To say good-bye we have to cut our minds apart. The experience has bent us. For the thirty minutes or so that it takes to reach the Perkins parking lot, I just hold her. The engine is so loud we couldn’t talk together if we tried.
We turn onto 100 and haven’t been driving two minutes when there is a sudden whirl of lights, a siren, the lights intensifying until they’re right behind us. Shawn keeps driving.
“Get down!” Sera covers us with tarps, piles junk over us. Tia’s a lot easier to hide than I am now.
“I’ll get out and talk to him,” says Sera.
Shawn slowly pulls onto the shoulder, but keeps the truck idling—not that making a break for it in a recycling truck would make the slightest sense—but it helps us to imagine he could do it. Sera says again that she’ll get out, but Shawn says she looks superfakey swimming in her Carhartts, skinny swan neck barely holding up her helmet, and he’d better do it. So we sit alone in the truck after his door slams and under that tarp I am hit by such a powerful wave of fear that I begin to shudder, can’t quit, can’t control myself, really. I just shake. Tia puts her arms around me and hugs herself to me so tightly that it’s like she’s trying to weld us together. But I’m falling to pieces. I am positive now that I’ll be discovered. I’ll die, we’ll die, back in the hospital. I’ll be killed real slow for killing Orielee. And they will kill you, too. My mind races like crazy and I get terrible pictures under the garbage-juice tarp, under the discarded coffee cups and greasy jackets. I’m in labor in a white, white, room. The Slider is there to keep me company. She smiles whenever I’m in pain. I faint. Maybe pee myself. But when Shawn comes back he puts the truck in gear and we move off.