A Children's Bible

by Lydia Millet

  “We have to message the parents,” I said, and told them what they needed to do. That was when they reminded me their phones had been trashed in the storm. For the first time, they seemed happy about it. Even gleeful.

  They wheeled their vehicles around and rode off again, whooping.

  SUKEY SPENT ALL her time keeping the baby clean and fed and warm.

  “Take a look,” she said to Jen and me, a bit proudly. Her sister lay in the middle of the bed in a bundle of blankets. The face was red and squashed, the top of the head a cone covered in black hair. She didn’t move much.

  “Hey, yeah!” I said. I wasn’t sure what Sukey expected. I couldn’t say the infant was adorable. I try not to lie. “Good job. You really stepped up,” was what I decided on.

  Then I looked at Sukey more closely. Her clothes were dirty, and her hair hung lank with grease.

  “I know,” I said. “I’ll stay here with Jen. We’ll watch the baby. You go take a break. Have a shower. OK?”

  Jen helped me convince her, and then she was in the bathroom while we sat listening to the patter of the water.

  On the bed the baby twitched in her sleep.

  “People are out there with guns?” said Jen. “And we’re supposed to drive through that to save their asses? Them?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  DEE’S MOTHER AND father were very sick. Also David’s mother. And Low’s (adoptive).

  Adopted or not, though, Low knew his blood type: O negative. He was a universal donor.

  He didn’t want to go, not in the least.

  But in the end he said yes.

  BURL DISABLED THE fingerprint function temporarily and gave us the keys to the silo. “Go up to the top,” he said as he climbed into the van. “Post a lookout. At all times. Text me if anything happens.”

  After they left, Dee and David and Low in the back of the van and Burl and Luca in front, Rafe and I climbed up.

  At the top of the stairs, whose winding around the circular wall made me dizzy, was a landing with a door. We stepped out onto a metal platform that jutted out of the half-dome roof, with a rickety rail around it and a ratty plaid lawn chair.

  I saw green fields broken by lines of trees, stretches of dirt road. The brown tops of scattered buildings, a farm to the right and a farm to the left. On the left side the backs of black-and-white cows, standing around an oblong tank, and on the right three kids in shorts, throwing a bright-yellow Frisbee.

  “Are those the ones we’re not supposed to hook up with?” asked Rafe.

  “Rule number nine, I think.”

  As I watched them run and throw, the glide of the disk through the air, things felt normal for a second. I had a quick flash of suspicion: maybe we’d invented the rest. Made it up for a lark, the storm and falling-down trees. The dead mother.

  I felt a quick pulse of relief. Until I realized I was inventing this. The real was fever. And ashes.

  Far off was the blue of sky, blurring into a haze.

  FOR A WHILE one of us was in the crow’s nest whenever it was light. We kept Val’s binoculars under the chair.

  Val liked keeping watch, though she wasn’t too vigilant. She tied a rope to the steel rail of the viewing platform and practiced climbing up and down. Rappelled faster and faster the more she practiced, grinning broadly when she kicked off against the silo’s metal skin.

  Rafe liked watch duty because he got to hit golf balls off the top with a club he’d stolen from the great house. Jen liked it because she got a break from helping with the baby. Terry liked it because he could write in his journal in privacy.

  Not much happened up there. I looked at the sky as much as the road, stuck in my earbuds and listened to music. I let my mind dwell on our absent friends. Gone off to give their blood. Even Dee, compulsively sanitizing her hands and body, and David with his monkey-wrenching began to seem like saints.

  Gone, they changed into abstractions. They were ideas, and ideas were more romantic than people.

  I even daydreamed about Low once, in a reverie that arose from boredom. I shuddered as I did it. Embarrassed by my own daydreams. Recoiling, but also not as bored.

  I wondered if a makeover would help. Usually it was women and girls that got makeovers, when in fact it was men and boys that needed them. If anyone did. I recalled various movies that featured makeover sequences, people becoming the best-looking versions of themselves. Turning from cater­pillars into butterflies. Montages set to inspiring music.

  In movies, makeovers were treated like a triumph of the human spirit.

  It suggested we’d had a low bar for triumph, in recent history. A dash of lipstick qualified, a haircut and some styling gel. A new outfit.

  That was what the human spirit had turned into.

  Meditations like those were the way I spent my time, on top of the silo.

  DAYS PASSED SLOWLY. It was a season of no storms and little rain. By the calendar it wasn’t fall yet, but somehow it wasn’t summer anymore either. Summer had been another time, when we had a great house to go back to, a shining lake, and the blue ocean.

  In the mornings we took care of the donkeys and goats and helped Mattie in the vegetable garden. We made lunch in rotation. As afternoon wore on, we washed dirty clothes in the cottage sink and hung them out to dry. We scrubbed ourselves down with cold water, shared toothbrushes until they fell apart, and used small dabs of toothpaste. Those of us with periods had to cut a single sponge into pieces. We boiled the pieces on the stove to sterilize them.

  The angels refueled the generator with gas from the silo. They liked to patrol the woods. We took turns cooking dinner with Darla and the angel named John, who’d been a sous-chef once. After dinner Sukey would take the baby to her mother’s grave and give her a bottle and rock her to sleep. She was building a cairn at the grave with rocks from the stream, a couple more every day.

  We mostly kept the lights off in the cottage, to save power and maintain a low profile. A few nights Rafe made fires outside, but we rationed them for safety. We’d gather close around the fire while the angels tried to teach us their hippie songs.

  Darla said singing was good for your health.

  “It’s like smiling,” she said. “The more you do it, the more you want to!”

  Juicy spat.

  They taught us a famous, sad song that went “Hello darkness my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again,” and a cheerful one called “Spirit in the Sky” that Jack liked because it talked about Jesus, his imaginary friend. The rest of us were OK with it because the angels said it was ironic. Written by a Jew from Massachusetts.

  “Never been a sinner, I never sinned,” we sang, off-key as the karaoke version played on our puck-shaped speaker. “I got a friend in Jee-sus.”

  Sometimes we yelled it, almost defiantly: “Never been a sinner! I never sinned!”

  A PHOTO CAME by text, onto Rafe’s phone from David’s. A view of the library in the great house. Chairs and tables and sofas had been pushed to the sides of the room, against the tall bookshelves, and a row of mattresses had replaced them.

  On the mattresses lay parents, and beside them David and Dee and Low. Zooming in, we could see thin red lines running between the arms of young and old. Graceful loops of tubing.

  It reminded me of a news story I’d read, with photos, about a pharma­ceutical lab. In it were hundreds of horseshoe crabs whose blood was being harvested for medical testing. The machines siphoned off enough blood that the crabs didn’t die but lived to be harvested again and again.

  The company called it blood farming.

  Beside me, Jack stared at the image as I zoomed. In the back, small and blurry, was the fireplace, and above it a painting of hunters with their hounds.

  He touched the tip of his finger to the screen, moved it along a red loop of tube from David to David’s mother. Tracing the swoops.

  “He’s going back where he came from,” he said.

  JACK AND SHEL were at a crucial moment in their
“childhood journey,” according to Darla. The time away from school and other kids their age could be “inhibiting their social and educational development.”

  She had an idea. “Our very own prairie school!” she cried, clapping her hands in delight. We cringed.

  They could take classes: biology taught by Mattie, history taught by John, and poetry taught by her.

  “The angels don’t have enough to do,” said Terry, when we conferred about it. “Could get antsy. Even destructive.”

  “Idle hands do the devil’s work,” said Rafe.

  So we said yes. They could “teach” the little boys, if they wanted. We thanked them for their interest.

  SOMETIMES I’D SIT in a parked car, motionless. I’d remember factories. I’d seen them onscreen in a hundred variations and always had the sense of them out there, churning, whirring, infinite moving pieces. Making the stuff we used.

  Now I wondered if they were still busy, manufacturing. Or were shuttered and dark. Were other factories in other places doing the work they used to do? Or were certain components no longer made at all?

  I let my eyes rest on a dashboard, its vinyl surfaces, the dust on the curves. I wondered what was behind the plastic and what parts of it were already obsolete.

  MY PHONE HAD ceased to interest me since the news started repeating, bringing a wash of grimness whenever I looked. I solved the problem by ignoring it.

  The others abandoned theirs too—days would pass between updates. Rafe and David texted a check-in at night, just: OK? out. And OK back.

  For a while that was it.

  Before the storm we’d caught sight of the parents’ screens sometimes, snagged their devices when we needed a quick fix. Gotten flashes of TV through a doorway. But these days we mostly had what was in front of us, the cottage and barn and long grass in the fields. Long and short, tussocks and bare patches. Topography. We had the wood of the walls and fences, the metal of the parked cars with their near-empty gas tanks.

  We had the corners of buildings and the slope of the hills, the line of the treetops. The more time passed, the more any flat image began to seem odd and less than real. Uncanny delicate surfaces. Had we always had them?

  We’d had so many pictures. Pictures just everywhere, every hour, minute, or second.

  But now they were foreign. Now we saw everything in three dimensions.

  POETRY CLASS TURNED out to be whatever Darla felt like saying. She also called it “humanities.” Once she talked about a head lice incident in third grade.

  “I was sent home right in front of the other kids,” I heard her tell the little boys. “They all knew. They pointed at me. They go, She’s got lice! Cooties cooties cooties!”

  Another time she talked about a friend in Maine who raised alpacas for wool and made socks out of it. The socks were expensive, but darn they kept your feet warm in winter.

  “And they’re moisture-wicking,” she told Jack.

  Shel showed her the signs for alpaca and sock.

  HISTORY WAS JOHN talking about places he’d visited—the Liberty Bell, Disneyland, the Museum of Ice Cream—but mostly it was the biography of his ex-girlfriend.

  She’d broken up with him and he missed her.

  BIOLOGY WAS THE best. It was held in the barn, where Mattie pulled up diagrams on his laptop and projected them onto a white­washed wall.

  Proterospongia, one was labeled. It looked like a tubular tree with eyeballs sprouting out of the ends of its branches.

  “These,” said Mattie, “are living examples of what the single-cell ancestor of all animals may have looked like.”

  Others joined the class, more every day. First there were just Jack and Shel. Then Juicy went, then Rafe, then Jen and Sukey, with the baby. Everyone. Some mornings they all went to sit in the barn. I’d watch from the open door and see them looking studious, their faces faithfully turned forward. They could have been children in school in a bygone era. In France when there were sun kings and halls of mirrors, in England before the world wars.

  Children who sat there learning from their teachers, full of trust. Secure in the knowledge that an orderly future stretched ahead of them.

  They sat quiet, gazing up at the projections.

  Everything made by others, everything deliberate came rushing back to me. The rich colors and elegant lines. Illustrations, artists’ renderings. There were cross sections and tree diagrams, diagrams like constellations and ladders and maps and spirals, and they told the story of the planet.

  We saw the first appearance of liquid water, after the moon was formed. The earth three billion years ago, with tides a thousand feet high and hurricane-force winds. The time when oxygen entered the atmosphere, made by the algae that allowed for the rest of life. They showed when plate tectonics began. A timeline of the first sex.

  Mattie said: “Sexual reproduction may have increased the rate of evolution.”

  People nodded, attentive. Even Juicy.

  “First multicellular organism? Anyone? Eight hundred million years ago. Five hundred and fifty million years ago we find the first evidence of—? Good, Jack. Jellies, sponges, and corals. Five hundred thirty million years ago we find the first known footprints on dry land. It means that early animals may have explored the land before there were even plants growing there.”

  “How about the first animals with bones?” asked Jack.

  “First vertebrates, four hundred eighty-five million.”

  The list of firsts went on so long it had to be continued from one day to the next. Each new form Mattie projected onto the barn’s wall had its colors and details: here a nautilus, here a jawless fish, here the filaments of a fungus or small hairs called cilia.

  He showed dinosaurs and ray-finned fishes, turtles, and flies. He showed silhouettes of trees with cones and told us they were gymnosperms. When they began to dominate the earth, he said, plant-eating animals had to grow to massive sizes to live off low-nutrition plants.

  He showed a graph of extinction events, like the spiky line on a seismograph.

  After a while we were so devoted to those pictures that we were almost disciples.

  ONE EVENING AT dinner I ate half a piece of rye bread from a newly opened silo loaf before I noticed mold on it. Mattie looked closely at the mold, told the others not to eat it, and then tried not to panic while he looked for an emetic in the supply cabinet.

  I took it, and he patted my back while I threw up into some bushes.

  He said it had been toxic. It wouldn’t kill me, now that I’d gotten rid of most of it, but the remnants in my system might give me hallucinations, like shrooms or peyote. Just drink a lot of water and sleep it off, he said.

  I woke up confused in the middle of the night. Thought I heard a car outside.

  Way out of it, head swimming and vision foggy, I climbed down the hayloft ladder with my legs shaking. The barn was dark except for a bulb in a cage that hung over the donkeys’ stall. They stood close together, their heads lowered and facing the wall.

  Someone was snoring, and I crept past wondering if I should be raising an alarm. But I was dizzy and couldn’t think straight.

  Pushing the barn door open with the flat of my hand, I saw Low and David beside the van. Its headlights were still on, and moths flitted around in the beams.

  “Dee didn’t come,” said Low.

  “She stayed with them,” said David.

  Their faces were in shadow, the van’s beams behind them. I could only see hollows for eyes.

  “She defected,” said Low.

  “Coward,” said David.

  “Traitor,” said Low.

  “Are the sick ones better?” I asked him.

  “They’re OK,” said Low.

  “Still dicks, though,” said David.

  “And what about Amy?”

  “She was in the basement.”

  “What? That whole time?”

  “Yeah. In a dark corner. Eating cereal from boxes.”

  The headlight shut off
and the front doors of the van opened. Burl and Luca got out. David flicked on a flashlight. Duffels and sleeping bags were unloaded. I was relieved and not sure why—maybe because that was all.

  Just the four of them. No parents had come along.

  I felt a new rush of dizziness, looking at the ones who’d returned. Behind them, hazy, I thought I could see the absent parents when I squinted. The night blurred. Or maybe just the shapes of them, their effigies. Or no, it wasn’t them, I realized—was it?

  It was them and not them, maybe the ones they’d never been. I could almost see those others standing in the garden where the pea plants were, feet planted between the rows. They stood without moving, their faces glowing with some shine a long time gone. A time before I lived. Their arms hung at their sides.

  They’d always been there, I thought blearily, and they’d always wanted to be more than they were. They should always be thought of as invalids, I saw. Each person, fully grown, was sick or sad, with problems attached to them like broken limbs. Each one had special needs.

  If you could remember that, it made you less angry.

  They’d been carried along on their hopes, held up by the chance of a windfall. But instead of a windfall there was only time passing. And all they ever were was themselves.

  Still they had wanted to be different. I would assume that from now on, I told myself, wandering back into the barn. What people wanted to be, but never could, traveled along beside them. Company.

  7

  NO ONE WENT to poetry except the little boys, and even they only attended to protect Darla’s feelings. She was always trying to take care of them.

  I sat near them the morning after I hallucinated, dreamily folding laundry at the picnic table. Subdued. Recovering.

  David and Low were throwing a tennis ball back and forth with the ones who’d stayed behind. They talked about the great house and the illness of the parents.

  Darla must have been lecturing on pottery, because I caught the words kneading the clay and indigenous. Also Mother Earth.