Future Home of the Living God(86)
I am the fiery life of the essence of God. I am the flame above the beauty of the fields. I shine in the waters. I burn in the sun, the moon, and the stars. And with the airy wind, I quicken all things vitally by an unseen, all-sustaining life.
Hildegard.
December 12
Every so often, a woman survives her pregnancy. A few times they’ve let her out, but more often, they keep her. From our exercise yard we can see a vast field filling with tiny white crosses. One cross for both mother and baby. Past the field of crosses, two more fences, more razor wire. In spite of the slipshod feeling of how it is run, there is no rescue from this place, in case you wonder why I never mention it. I know that even with all of their combined ingenuity my family is not going to get me out of here. When I miss them to an unbearable degree, I sing the song for you, baby. Or I untuck a page of Eddy’s manuscript from my pack. It helps.
Page 3034
The Pebble
I live yet because of a common pebble.
Yesterday the bubble burst. Once again, I saw into the depth of things; only it was worse because things are so much deeper now. Not one aspect of the world could appeal to me or affect me. Not the end of things and not the beginning. There were no colors. Everything was neutral. From this I know that hell is not black or fiery. It is an unvaried gray without promise. And so the morning passed with its coffee and dry cereal. By noon, I was at the Superpumper, deciding which method to use.
As I walked with a length of rope toward the woods out back of the shop, a pebble flipped into my shoe. It hurt. Each step was painful. I stopped, and removed it. The stone was a bit of ferric oxide, earthy banded hematite, strayed from the Mesabi Range, where one-third of the world’s iron ore was at one time located. This piece of stone was laid down as a sediment in the Animikean sea sometime during the middle Precambrian period in Minnesota, and was probably between 2.6 and 1.6 billion years old. The pebble was a rich, deep, hot, clay red, striated and shaped like a tiny toaster.
I tossed it over my shoulder and continued down the path. Another pebble. Ouch. This time it was pointed. This, too, was no ordinary rock, but a shard of graywacke or greenstone, a basaltic lava that was perhaps shoved to the surface of the earth 3.5 billion years ago during the Keewatin. Howah! Lotta time. I dropped the stone to the side of the path and kept walking toward a particular tree I’d picked out sometime before. A good strong branch jutted from the trunk. Perfect to swing a rope over.
Oops, another. These low docksiders, whiteman’s shoes, seemed to scoop the rocks right in. This pebble was a dime-sized circle of black basalt shaped by lake waves and probably poured out at one time from a deep volcanic fissure under the sea that covered us. The lava cooled and was broken into bits that washed away, eventually to the shore, changing on the way to this lovely water-stroked smoothness. This one I placed carefully upon a stump. The youngest pebble, it was probably no more than several million years old.
I had nearly reached the tree when a final rock cut me—actually cut me as I stepped down upon it. An agate, inexplicably shattered, it showed the grain of the fossilized wood and algae that it had once been. What colors! A light bronze, gray, black, and deep red. There was a landscape within its features. Chert surrounded by jasper. A living thing. It would make, I thought, a beautiful necklace for Sweetie, were it only polished.
I don’t know why they want me here on earth, the little rocks. I don’t know why they care about me as they do. I only know that by the time I reached the tree I had no choice but to fling the rope away from myself. I turned back, my fingers rubbing the little agate. All the way back to the store not a single rock slipped underfoot.
December 14
We’re in a gray spell—a week of clouded-over, indifferent weather. There isn’t even a patch of blue sky to lift a person’s thoughts. It feels to me like everything is sliding away. I am alone with the truth of my body—you are in it and I have to get you out.
Baby, I love you but you are huge. Your exit is supposed to stretch, but ten centimeters isn’t that much wider than the mouth of a water glass. How stretchy am I? Not that stretchy. I’m rigid. I’ve always been a rigid thinker, and am lousy at yoga. You should stop growing right now, you are already too big, but you don’t care. You continue to grow and grow.
My headaches, how I see bright spots, my spiking blood pressure, these could be signs that my body is having the allergic reaction to your presence. I tell nobody but Estrella. I’m puffing up. I push my finger into the flesh of my calf and the dent stays dented.
“Look,” I say.
She touches my calf with her fingertips, and frowns.
December 15
There are usually two doctors and a nurse in the room when I get a checkup. I go in every single day now. The ultrasound machines are still messed up. So I just get the regular sort of offhand check—my blood pressure is high, very high, which is why I’m being watched, my doctor says. There is something familiar about my doctor. Every time I see her, I feel that I’ve somehow seen her before, even known her, but there are always the others in the room so I never dare to ask. But then one day I am alone with the doctor for a moment. She’s wearing square blue eyeglasses.
“Have I seen you before?”
She smiles at me and bends over as if to tie her shoe. When she gets up, she grips my hand as if to comfort me. I feel a tiny bit of paper in my palm. I grasp it and turn over on the examining table, which is not easy, it’s a big deal at 38-plus weeks. I shake my hair as if I’m pouting, and read the paper inside the curtain of my hair. The dust around us listens, the walls see, the air pumped into this room tastes our emotions.