Future Home of the Living God(83)

Although, I have to say, everything here looks poorly organized. The faucets work, but the water is rusty. The lights work, but lots of the bulbs are dead. The floors are clean, but that’s because we clean them ourselves. The screens they use to watch us keep blinking out. Still, the doors upon doors to the outside are carefully locked. I can see people in the guard towers when I get to use the hallways.



December 3

Every morning at ten a.m. we’re seated in a room to practice for labor. The light goes down in the room. We sit on yoga mats. It is peaceful enough. We keep our eyes closed. We travel. This morning, while I am doing my counting and breathing, Orielee and Bernice come flying toward me. They are naked, moving fast, leaking coils of darkness from their mouths and ears. Smoke bleeds from their nipples, from their navels. Hot black steam flows out between their legs. A roaring noise beats from their bodies, like the sound of a vast crowd. I open my arms. They are alive! I am not afraid.



December 4

Today two male guards collect me from my cell. They are wearing brown uniforms, but there is something sloppy and tired about how they are dressed. You can see a ripped, dirty collar of a T-shirt between the missing buttons of one guy’s shirt. They bring me to a room that might have once been an office—there is a wall of bookshelves, a window, and a couple of fake plants—but now it is tricked out as a photography studio. Miguel, a slender man, curly headed, dressed in yellow, with melting eyes, reminds me of Prince.

He greets me as though I’m the loveliest woman in the world. “Hello, my hummingbird! I’m your personal makeup artist. Wow. Hmmm. You could be anything. What you want to look like? Whitebread? Brownbread? House Mom? Street Babe?”

He tousles my hair, pulls it up, lets it flop down. I ask him if I can be the Blessed Virgin. His eyes flicker with interest, his face goes solemn. He puts his hands on my shoulders and bends over so we stare at ourselves together in the mirror. The sadness in his face chills me.

“I see blue. I’ll add some blue extensions. We want the sensation of blue. Your face is sweet. I’ll make it sweeter. Your hair is . . . I won’t do much . . . fabulous.”

He parts my hair in the middle and strokes it down around my shoulders.

“It spreads out nice, like a cape.”

“A veil.”

“Like a veil.”

He opens a fishing tackle box covered with stickers, filled with bottles of foundation, eyeliner, fake lashes, lipstick. It is soothing to have him study my face, touch my cheeks with his fingertips, dab here, dab there. He combs my hair out so gently that it feels like I am being touched by butterflies. I close my eyes and let him brush shadow across my lids. He then has me look up and flicks mascara onto my lashes.

“We’ll go with a very light natural color,” he says as he tenderly outlines my mouth with matte lipstick. He thriftily tears a Kleenex in half, uses the end. “Now blot.”

He makes drama of pulling off my makeup gown, puffing it like a cloud, flinging it away and replacing it with a blue scarf draped around my shoulders. He leads me to a chair with a backdrop that is painted with a sunny circle of radiance. The glow surrounds my head once I am eased onto the chair.

“I’m the photographer, too, right? You’re divine. You’re special. You’re a giver of life. That’s right. Let all the beauty inside of you rush to the surface. Let your beauty into your eyes, your face.”



Lunch is fried sweet potatoes and chicken soup, although apparently chickens are not chickens anymore—they look like pale iguanas.

“What’s that?”

“A piece of skin.”

The woman next to me dislodges the scaly skin from her finger and goes on eating her soup. There is a salad with odd thick leaves and gnarled tomatolike vegetables. Halfway through the meal, I notice the dining room wall. It is filled with portraits of women. They all have the same glow around their heads. As I walk up to the wall to see if my portrait is there, a burly redheaded woman stops me. Her face and arms are covered with tiny cinnamon dots of freckles. Her kinky red Botticelli hair is twisted up in a bun. She’s about eight months.

“Don’t go up to the wall,” she says. “Don’t look.”

“How come?”

She purses her lips, like she has a lot to say, but she only gives a terse growl. “It’s bad luck.” Which is enough to keep me away from the wall, for now. I sleep away the afternoon under my fuzzy pink blanket. Dinner is a mushy glop of brown paste, plus a cup of sour berries.

“I miss food,” I say to the women on either side of me. One is a thin woman with a medium-sized seven-month belly.

“I miss food, too.”

The other is a brown-haired woman in her forties with pink cheeks and purple eyeglasses. She says that she is carrying baby number three.

“Third time’s the charm,” I say. It is involuntary. She stares at me. Her eyes fill. She looks down at her plate.

“I hope so,” she mumbles.

“Me too,” says the thin girl. Her eyes are huge, haunting. Her name is Estrella. “I used to love roasted chicken. I made it with lemon. Won’t catch me roasting a lizard.”

“Maybe cows will stay the same, just tougher,” I say. “What . . . what happens in here?”

“Where did you use to live?” the brown-haired woman asks me, loudly, looking around us. Then she leans close and whispers, “They used to just take pregnant woman. Now any woman who’s childbearing age. You can get picked up for running a stoplight or jaywalking. I’m here for shoplifting, which was stupid, but I needed food. Any mistake and you end up here.”