Future Home of the Living God(65)
“That was interesting,” he says to Sera. We poke our heads out. “We’ve got another pickup to make. Route J. 4778 Knox,” he says. “The guy’s daughter is six months pregnant and she will be waiting in the garage on our regular pickup.”
Shawn mumbles the route and address until he won’t forget it. He never writes anything down. Holding each other, Tia and I bump along until we feel the truck make a swooping turn and another turn. It halts and idles in the lot of a Jiffy Lube right behind the Perkins, next to the trash enclosure, shielded from the frontage road.
“Stay down,” says Shawn. Then he says, “Easy, Tia, poke your head up a tad and look out the left-hand window, over my shoulder. Tell me if the car and the guy behind the wheel belong to you.”
Tia eases her body past mine, carefully, until she’s looking out the window.
“Yeah, that’s him.”
Her voice is thick and teary, but what is there to say? We lock hands a moment.
“Get out, now,’’ says Sera.
“Walk, don’t run,” says Shawn.
She’s out the door. I peek up over Shawn’s shoulder to see her approach the gray car, the shadowy man inside. She ducks in the passenger-side door. The car calmly reverses, turns, and rolls out of the parking lot. And that’s that. She’s gone, my Tia, that’s all there is.
“Let’s fire it up,” says Shawn, pressing on the gas.
*
The Minneapolis Post Office, perhaps the only major Minnesota building built to withstand an earthquake, was made in 1934 out of Kasota stone, a golden pink rock quarried in Mankato, Minnesota. A number of other buildings in the city, new and old, are made from this unusually pleasant stone. I have noticed the rock. I think it gives buildings a warm feel in the harsh winter, a kind of glow, and I’ve always liked going to the post office for that reason. Also, it is stalwart looking for an art deco building. No decadent elegance. The post office has a broad-shouldered look. It was designed to be seen from a distance, approached slowly and with serious postal errands in mind, but it has been surrounded by the city, so now it looms beside you without warning.
We enter through a roll-up door on the loading dock, which we reach only through several National Guard checkpoints. We do it in early daylight. Everybody needs their recyclables hauled, right? Shawn and Sera don’t think that this connection will last longer than a couple of weeks more, but it works for us. Sera and I are out of the truck and whisked in so quickly that I hardly get more than a backward glance at Shawn. He’s wide-eyed, nodding, nervous. Once we’re in, a small pink-cheeked woman with a cockatoo crest of white hair takes us to a room in the vast lower level where the mail is sorted among a gray-toned warren of offices, staff meeting rooms, and utility closets.
She puts us in a closet containing a big soapstone sink for cleaning mops. The closet has a small window carefully trimmed out. On the corners of the window there are small square tiles of lilies, brown, with green tile background. We are facing north, and silvery-gray river light floods through the old-fashioned frosted glass. Although there is hardly room to lie down, I am not in the least claustrophobic. The room is cold, and clean. Even though the white-haired woman clicks the door shut as she leaves and locks us in, I am suddenly filled with the sense that we’re going to be all right, that we’re going to make it out. The comfort that the details on the window give me is perhaps extreme—but the fact that human beings thought to invest a mop and broom utility closet with a touch of charm gives me hope. Mom and I sit down on the floor, cozy up on a couple of couch cushions.
“Come here,” she says, and I creep near, lean against her. She pulls me to her with a sigh and strokes my hair. I look at the lilies on the window, the calm light through the panels, the careful way the tile was inset, countersunk into the wood. How the flowers were fired and colored into the design. Perhaps this sort of gesture will be lost, perhaps it is a function of consciousness that we don’t need in order to survive. Perhaps this piece of evolution makes no sense—our hunger for everyday sorts of visual pleasure—but I don’t think so. I think we have survived because we love beauty and because we find each other beautiful. I think it may be our strongest quality.
“Here.” Sera adjusts me, reaches into her pack. She unwraps a granola bar and hands it to me. A real foil-wrapped oats-and-honey bar—the kind we bought all the time in gas-station markets just a couple of months ago. They’re rare now. I eat it slowly, dissolving one oat at a time, melting myself into her once again. Her back’s against the wall and I think I may be too heavy for her.
“You’re okay, you’re fine,” she says.
I am flooded with exhaustion. It rolls over me and shuts my eyes midbite. I wake probably a couple of hours later, shocked to consciousness by dreams, seeing Orielee’s eyes lose life, her feet drumming on the dirty pink hospital linoleum. At first I don’t even remember where I am, but when I realize I’m still in Sera’s arms I sink back, and let myself cry, luxuriantly, tears popping from my eyes and cooling my face. Weeping feels sweet and profound, but maybe it’s not a safe thing to do, so I stop. Sera has not moved, not put me down, in all that time. Now I move away from her, sure she’s aching. She rolls her shoulders, stretches out her arms. Her hair shimmers in the light. I stretch too, then curl up on the floor. She gives me a drink of water from the bottle she carries.