Future Home of the Living God(69)

Dear Subscribers,

This may be your last issue of Zeal magazine, and so I want to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you for showing your support by sending in your checks and keeping up my subscription list. I have news that may upset some of you, but I think it only right to come forward and say that I am pregnant, and that so far the pregnancy has gone well in spite of the relentless persecution that I have suffered along with every other pregnant woman in this time. I am writing now from a secret location, and am indebted to people whose names are unknown to me. By the time you open this issue of the magazine, I may very well be holding my baby in my arms. I hope so. I have learned a great deal about the subject of this issue—the Incarnation. That my body is capable of building a container for the human spirit has inspired in me the will to survive. It has also shown me truths.

Someone has been tortured on my behalf. Someone has been tortured on your behalf. Someone in this world will always be suffering on your behalf. If it comes your time to suffer, just remember. Someone suffered for you. That is what taking on a cloak of human flesh is all about, the willingness to hurt for another human being.

I have seen a young woman in labor endure more pain than Christ did in his three-hour ordeal on the cross. She suffered continuously for twenty-four hours. And I have heard of labors lasting much longer. To bear this child, I will go through whatever pain I must. I can’t help wishing for an epidural, but this is why I’m writing. This is the Incarnation. The spirit gives flesh meaning. We’re only meat bundles, otherwise.

I believe in this issue that my colleague Father Mirin Thwaite sheds light, just as Bartolomé de Las Casas did in arguing for the existence of the souls of indigenous tribal people of colonial South America, that the children born during this present time will be possessed of souls whether or not they are capable of speech, and should be considered fully human no matter what scientists may conclude about their capacity to think and learn. I mean, I still don’t know what’s going on—but had to throw that in.

Also in this issue, another paper on the Incarnation concerns the actual moment of Immaculate Conception, and examines textual and artistic evidence that the orifice of impregnation for the Blessed Virgin Mary was her ear. Taking into account recent left brain/right brain studies, the author concludes that a word whispered in the left ear would have affected Mary’s right hemisphere and caused the deep flood of emotion so crucial to mom-child bonding. This emotional “baptism” may have allowed Mary to go forward, even knowing that great suffering was to result from her baby’s birth. I can only say, from my point of view . . .

*

Sera is awake—it is as though I can feel her thinking above me in her hammock. I’ve been jolted out of the knife blade of radiance that was enabling me to write, and I’ve scrambled back into my swinging bed, the most comfortable place to ride. The movement is lulling, the air is greeny black. Yet I fight sleep. Fear comes over me and I struggle to stay awake—I do not want to lose control of my thoughts and go back to Orielee’s murder. Instead of lessening, growing dulled with time, muted, the memory or dream is growing more and more powerful. Each time it’s worse. I am experiencing it as a drama that unfolds with such swift violence it shakes my bones.

This can’t be good for you, the stress.

We jolt on and on. Miles. Eventually, it occurs to me that maybe I really do need to confess what happened, get it out of the interior of my mind. And since there is no priest I have only one person who can hear my confession.

“Mom?”

But now she’s fallen asleep. I call her, louder; she wakes and answers, a little grumpy, “What is it?”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Uhhh.”

“Really bad, Mom.”

She sounds extremely tired, moody, and groggy, but I’m overcome with the urge to clear my conscience. Maybe I can confess to her in her sleep and that way I’ll feel better, having spoken aloud, and she won’t know what I’ve said and what I’ve done.

“So Mom, I have to tell you something. It’s been eating away at me and I can’t sleep very well, can’t sleep at all, really. So anyway, Mom? Here goes. I killed, I had to kill someone, Mom, back at the hospital. See, we were just about ready to leave when this nurse named Orielee, she was okay though she wasn’t trustworthy and she definitely was a snoop, the nurse discovered that we were hiding our rope in the heating vent. Mom?”

“Yeah . . . I’m listening . . . ,” she mumbles.

“Good, okay, so then Tia and I thought maybe she had not seen it or she wasn’t going to give us away. And we had jumped up and were walking behind her, I mean, we couldn’t have looked guiltier! Maybe we wouldn’t be here, maybe we would have let her go, but then as she was going out the door, she laughed. That laugh, it just said everything, you know? You know, Mom? Mom?”

“’Course, honey.”

“Okay. So Tia had ripped off a strip of her hospital gown—she was taking that apart to make a bag to carry down her stuff. She threw this strip around Orielee’s neck and started strangling her with it. Of course, there was no getting out of it once she started killing the nurse—we couldn’t exactly stop and say excuse us, could we? I didn’t know up until that time that Tia even could speak, but she glares at me and says, Little help? That strikes me as funny now, sorry! Little help! And she’s killing this poor nurse with a pretty name who is going to betray us. I thought it would be the Slider who found out, but no, it had to be Orielee. I’m sorry, but I wish that it had been the Slider, because she was so easy to despise. I keep thinking, now, of how somebody had to discover Orielee stuffed in the closet, hanging off the clothes hook. That would be a sickening shock, huh, seeing her? I tried to turn her face away from the door, and we’d covered her head with a pillowcase, but still. So anyway, what I’m telling you, Mom, is that I committed a murder. I have to go to hell now, I think. I don’t know if I can be absolved or not—I’m saying lots of prayers, of course. I’ve got my rosary in my hand this very minute. But if I do have to go to hell, I’d like to know what it will be like. What do you think it will be like, Mom?”