Now it’s too late. Our bodies have always remembered who we were. And now they have decided to return. We’re climbing back down the swimming-pool ladder into the primordial soup. We pregnant ladies find this out and make sure to take our folic acid supplements and get some sleep, all while growing within ourselves a unit of life so complex, regardless of its evolved state, that only the Koreans can make even one of its fingernails with all of their technology. And here I am, wiring a whole new brain in my sleep, some kind of brain. My body is accomplishing impossible things, and now there is something wrong, most terribly wrong. . . . As I write these last words my knees begin to shake and the shaking travels as a shudder up through my body and wrenches a cry. And the sound of my own cry, ugly and raw, startles me. I go silent for a moment and then began to weep, in low gut-wrenched sorrow, a baffled, fearful sobbing that leaves me beached after a while in my desk chair, still facing the calm, blue screen.
I am sitting there, thinking into the blue, when, without my touching the keys, a woman’s face blooms onto the screen.
“Hello,” she says, just to me, her eyes meeting mine. “I am Mother. How are you today?”
I do not answer. My computer camera is taped over, but the speakers must be on. There must be a problem with the power button. It’s as if she knows I’m here.
“How are you feeling?” she asks. Her voice is drenched with warmth. “I care. I’d like to know.”
Her face is round and white like pizza dough. Her cheeks sag. Her smile is tiny with thin stripes of red lip. Her brown hair, a Prince Valiant helmet, sits firmly on her skull. Her shrewd brown eyes twinkle. She is wearing an apricot-colored blouse with a draped neckline.
“How are you feeling?” she asks, again, and again. “How are you, dear?”
August 20
All the lights on, the blinds shut, the reading lamps glowing on my desk, white paper and white walls. I try to call your Songmaker grandparents but there is no answer on any of their numbers. I don’t leave messages. They’ll call me back when they can. I have avoided the computer after it conjured up the helmet-haired entity. I still have my cell phone but I am cautious and only check it once a day for news. I scroll through to try and shield myself. No cellular data. No location services. Anyway, the news. There is more consternation, greater piles of details that seem more misleading than useful, a specially convened emergency session of Congress, more findings. Men in dark suits staring at large-screen ultrasound images. Men in dark suits peering at freeze-framed ultrasound babies and speculating about just what the abnormalities in the neocortex could mean in terms of cognition. And also what it means that male sexual organs are not developing properly. Sometimes not developing at all. The number of females conceived has apparently risen. Still, I have a feeling you are a boy.
Stop thinking about the future.
Now is all we have, I tell myself. Work on the now, the hereness, the present, the moment of extreme hyperawareness which is also linked to Sera’s most profound mental exercise, her meditation, and which is something I have trouble with. I am more comfortable with the before-ness or the after-ness of life. I am happier dissecting the past or dreading the future. I really have no proficiency at simply experiencing the present. But since the past is so different from the future that to think back at all is like looking down the wrong end of a telescope, and since the future is so disturbing that to give in at all to my imagination is enough to cause a full-blown panic attack, it is really best for our mutual health if I stay focused on what is most immediate. I have to treat myself like a skittish horse. An animal ready to bolt at the sight of the big picture. Stick to the periphery. Pull on a comforting set of blinders.
Hide the liquor.
All I have to do is fit the bottles and the ammunition into the walls of the house, wherever I’ve added the insulation. For the rest of the day, fitting bottles into the walls, boxes of ammunition here and there, screwing the Sheetrock back on with my handy electric drill, I keep thinking about Blessed Mary. I think about her while I tape the seams. Later, I’ll skim-coat the seams. Then repaint. I enjoy doing monotonous home repairs. It’s satisfying. While I seal off the booze I can meditate. I put the cigarettes in plastic tubbies and ease the tubbies into the crawl space behind the boiler. Once I’ve got walls on, I break down the liquor boxes and put them out in the garage, into the recycling, which may never be picked up.
After all of this is done I drive to my usual grocery and am surprised to find it well stocked. I load up on salt, rice, beans, whole wheat flour, pancake mix, lots of canned vegetables, and peanut butter. I also buy luxuries. A bottle of juice, a crisp New Zealand apple, a stack of stoned-wheat crackers, and a ball of mild white mozzarella. At home, I set my treats out on my desk. How long, I wonder, will there be a snack like this to eat—cheese from a cow milked in Italy, crackers packaged in New Jersey, fruit squeezed in Florida, an apple from the other side of the world?
Today’s job is editing the church newsletter. I take a deep breath, and turn on my computer, just for word processing. I feel it is my duty to write for the parish. As I’ve said, I joined the church to make friends, and to bug my parents. But I love my church. It is a humble place—no limestone cathedral, no basilica. It doesn’t even have the name of a saint. It has the name of my present obsession. Holy Incarnation was founded to care for the most destitute people in the city, the cast-asides, the no-goods, the impossible, the toxic and contaminated. It is a small glass and brick and cinder-block place with no convenient parking. It is very different from the exurb Protestant churches that I have also attended, with their vast asphalted lots, their vaults of stone and cement, their jumbotrons up front to show close-ups of the minister. Mine is not a church of the saved, but a church of the lost.
As I am putting together the Thoughts page, my screen goes dark and swirly. This time she floats slowly into focus from the depths.
“Hello, dear. How are you?”
Her full cheeks are cement gray this time, set hard around her smile.
“Mother is thinking all about you. Would you like to tell me about your day?”
I shut down my computer.
My hands are trembling. I push myself away from the dark screen. But I can’t get up. Can’t move. The phone starts ringing, and it won’t quit. It rings continually for ten minutes, then falls silent for a moment, starts again. Twenty-five minutes after the last ring, there is a knock at the door. That is the length of time it takes for your father to get from his apartment to my house, so I know he’s standing on the front steps right now. It is too late to douse the lights. He knows that I am home, and still I sit paralyzed before the dead computer. The door begins to shake. He is rattling the curved metal handle and pounding on the wood. Soon he begins shouting my name. My street is quiet and ends at an old railroad embankment. As I said, it is a forgotten cul-de-sac, a street untouched either by gentrification or destitution. It is not a through street. I am sure my neighbors are peeping from between their blinds or glancing around the sides of their curtains, curious. I leave my office and walk down my dark hall to the door. I stand behind the shaking frame and take about six deep breaths before I can trust myself to talk without my voice shaking or my throat shutting.
“Go away.”
He hears me, and quits. We are standing silent on either side of the shut door. I put the palm of my hand against the doorknob and then lower my forehead to the wood. I can hear him breathing on the other side and I am sure he can hear me as well. The door is constructed of three panels, the top a large rectangle and the other two below, neatly margined. The wood is stained a dark reddish brown and the grain underneath the varnish is umber, streaked and tangled.
“Open up, Cedar, I have to tell you something.”
I cannot let him in, but I can’t leave the door, either.
“I’ll call the police,” I say at last.
“I’m here because of the police,” he says. “Have you heard? Have you seen the news?”
> “No.”
“Please, let me in right now so I don’t attract more attention. I don’t want anyone to see me out here and get suspicious. Please, it’s true, I swear.”
“What’s true?”
“They’re coming for you.”
* * *
They are rounding us up. Here is what your father told me, once I’d let him into the house and doused the lights. By a narrow majority the House and Senate have voted to strengthen and give new powers to what began so long ago as the Patriot Act. There were articles I, II, III, IV, and now we are up to V, section 215 of which still allows our government to seize entire library and medical databases in order to protect national security. This newly expanded decision, now only hours old, empowers the government to determine who is pregnant throughout the country. Your father says that the surgeon general they had was fired and the new one has announced that pregnant women will be sequestered in hospitals in order to give birth under controlled circumstances. It is for our own safety and we are required to go voluntarily. Those who do go in right now will receive the best rooms. The best rooms! Heart in my throat, I think of the doctor who probably put himself at risk. He gave me the ultrasound picture. He knew. Best rooms. Hysterical. Will women turn themselves in thinking that a bit more privacy, a better view, an extra chair, is worth it? We’re not going. And I am lucky, we are lucky. Because I used that old insurance card from the job I had working on the alumni magazine at the University of Minnesota, we will be hard to find. The card has an old box number, no street address. But in the middle of the night, I sit up, eyes wide. I used my credit card to buy baby clothes at Target. I paid my credit card bill online. I slip back down into the tangle of blankets. I am being pregnancy-purchase-tracked by Mother. Your father sleeps beside our bed on a pile of couch pillows. He has folded his wings. We are all three together for the first time. But we are already halfway found.
* * *
Now it is done. Days pass. We cannot leave each other. Ever.
* * *
I keep sending the same telepathic messages: Call me, Mom, call me, Dad, call me, call me. I touch in their number, but they are not home. Then one day someone picks up the telephone on the first ring and a woman says, “Songmaker residence, can I help you?”
The overly pleasant voice is not my mom’s, but it is familiar. Fulsome, full of inquiry, too avid. I put down the telephone. It is an old-fashioned black touch-tone with translucent buttons and black numbers. I don’t know what sort of information it holds or whether my messages on my parents’ voice mail can be accessed and traced back to me, here. Although my telephone bills come to my box number, my street address must be in the company’s records.
All day, I keep hearing that voice, the lilt increasingly sinister, Can I help you? A parodic melody. Can I help you?
August 25
I saw my first gravid female detention this morning in a mall parking lot where your father had driven to get Subway sandwiches for the two of us. It was stupid to go out, but we were disoriented by our long seclusion and I persuaded your father to take me after I looked critically at my reflection and decided that I didn’t show. When you give something a name like female gravid detention, it becomes official. I was careful. I wore an overcoat, though it was warm, and of course I didn’t intend to get out of the car. Once we’d parked, I squeezed down and opened the car window. That’s when I saw her. She was a petite woman wearing a red and white flowered smock. She had warm brown skin and wore a buttercup yellow scarf that pulled her hair back in a perky bun. She was wearing flip-flops and I was close enough to see that her toenails were painted the same clear scarlet as the red in her dress. She was perhaps in her early thirties and looked about seven months along—not terribly obvious, but observably pregnant enough, I guess, for the two police officers, one male and one female, to approach and question. While in the sandwich shop your father watched his sandwich artisans construct my sub and answered questions like Wheat? Cheddar? Jalapeño peppers? The police officers apparently asked to see the woman’s driver’s license. She looked confused, annoyed, as she reached into her purse and pulled out her wallet. Perhaps she hadn’t watched the news. And of course she had done nothing. She decided that this was a mistake. Her pregnancy did not occur to her. The female police officer tipped up a pad, peering at and typing in the name on the license. The pregnant woman at first questioned the police aggressively. Then her mouth shut in a straight line and she began to look nervously at the entrance to a large discount shoe store where, perhaps, a friend or family member might appear. When her name apparently showed up in the files, the male officer grasped her elbow. She went rigid. She twisted toward the shoe store and a look of distress came over her face. A man appeared in the doorway, a white man holding the hand of a little girl a paler brown than her mom, about five years old.
Perhaps his wife had gone back to the car for her purse, or perhaps she was coming from another store. He looked both ways along the sidewalk, impatient. Perhaps they were buying shoes for their daughter and he needed help deciding, or perhaps the child hadn’t liked any of the shoes that were displayed in the store. The little girl was a small version of the mom, pretty and alert. She wore a pink sundress with white daisies printed all over it.
Suddenly, the little girl spotted her mom and pointed at her; the officers were attempting to coax her along to the squad car. The mom wouldn’t go. The male officer began to pull the pregnant woman’s arm and the female officer, poker faced and wooden, had now positioned herself on the other side of the woman and was trying to lift her. The man in front of the shoe store bolted forward and the pregnant woman cried out and flung herself toward him. People on the sidewalks and in the parking lot now stopped still to watch, frowning. They must have noticed that the pregnant woman was strikingly pretty, and her smooth rounded belly made her even more sweetly vulnerable. Her husband approached swiftly looking as though he had a reasonable query on his lips. The police ignored him and started dragging at his wife. She planted her feet in refusal. Her husband was a medium-sized man, but suffused with anger and protective belligerence he seemed to grow larger. His neck swelled and his eyes narrowed, the veins in his throat pumped. He grabbed the male officer and tried to wrestle the man down, but the police officer, more agile and trained, quickly flipped the man onto the ground and drew his gun. He pointed the gun at the man’s face. The little girl, who had followed her father, stopped short and began to cry, her face a crumpled flower. A bystander pulled the girl into the crowd. The female police officer succeeded in pulling and pushing the pregnant woman all the way up to the car, but the crowd had now grown. Several people had begun to shout. A terrible sound came from the mom—a wail, a shriek, a roar—as she was stuffed, kicking, into the car. The male officer handcuffed the husband, sitting on the small of his back and twisting his arm. He was pointing his gun at the bystanders, who shied back, though some were still yelling. The officer was young. His lips disappeared into the white rock of his face until he was all teeth. He jumped into the car and drove off, not quickly, no sirens wailing, so there was then an unreal and frozen quality about the whole scene in which the only sound to hear was the high-pitched, broken sobbing of the child.
I’d hunkered way down in my seat by then. I had pulled up my knees and wrapped my arms around my thighs so that I was balled protectively around you when your father returned with my wrapped sandwich and a large soda in a waxed cup, the straw pushed inside the cross cut into the leak-resistant top.
“Did you see it?” I said. “They took away a pregnant woman.”
Your father looked at me, his brown eyes round and still. “I was in there debating mustards. I missed it.”
“What should we do?”
“Did anybody see you?”
“No.”
We drove quietly and carefully out of the parking lot. The little girl was still sobbing. People were bent over the handcuffed man. I rolled up my window. As our car moved away I experienced a sinkin
g sensation, a crawling panic, nausea. I closed my eyes and let it overcome me and swamp me. The feeling boiled up like an inner stink. By the time we reached home, I understood that I couldn’t bear that I had done nothing. Little sweetheart, I had to protect you. But still, I was ashamed.
* * *
We walked in the back door so at first I didn’t see the note that had been slipped underneath the front door, a note in Sera’s handwriting.
Don’t call us, honey, and don’t leave any messages. We’re all right. Stay safe. We took all of the records.
The Names of Angels
Zaphkiel, Zadkiel, Camiel, Raphael, Haniel, Michael, Gabriel, Malchideal, Asmodel, Ambriel, Muriel, Verchiel, Hamaliel, Zuriel, Barbiel, Advachiel, Hanael, Gambiel, Barchiel, Geniel, Enediel, Amnixiel, Azariel, Cabiel, Dirachiel, Scheliel, Amnediel, Ardesiel, Nociel, Abduxuel, Jazeriel, Ergodiel, Ataliel, Azeruel, Adriel, Egibiel, Amutiel, Kiriel, Bethnael, Geliel, Requiel, Abrinael, Aziel, Tagriel, Alhoniel, Cherub, Tharsus, Ariel, Seraph, Uricus, Amaymon, Paymon, Egyn,
and then there is also Phil.
The Angel Phil is the seventh Olympic spirit of the moon. According to a book and manuscripts long banned in my church, the Angel Phil can change all metals into silver. He governs all lunary things and heals dropsy. He can show us the spirits of water and make us live three hundred years. He has a great, full body, soft of color like a black, obscure cloud. A swelling countenance with bloodshot and watery eyes. A bald head. Teeth like a wild boar. His sign is rain. Sometimes he appears as a king riding on a deer. A little boy. A woman hunter with bow and arrows. A cow. A goose. A garment of green or silver. An arrow. A creature having many feet.