Knocking on Heaven's Door

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by Sharman Apt Russell


  The Roman emperor had repeated what others had said before him, Heraclitus and Epictetus, the Stoics and pre-Socratics, and how had they known? How did so many tribal people know, ancient peoples like the hunters and gatherers around the world that The Return tried so hard to emulate, like the Pueblo people of the American Southwest who breathed into stones and said hello? Old Marcus Aurelius: “Everything is interwoven, and the web is holy: none of its parts are unconnected.”

  His statue standing next to the jar with Einstein’s brain.

  Brad got out his solarcomp and transmitters, and in a few minutes, the radios were humming. Thunderstorms sparked through the night sky. Lightning flashed again and again. The DNA switched on, and Einstein’s consciousness shimmered in the air. Wild waving white hair and round spectacles formed immediately. The professor was dressed in a twentieth-century dinner suit with pressed trousers and shirt and jacket with golden pocket watch and fob. Brad was so relieved. He had so many important questions to ask. He knelt before the great scientist and begged, “Can you untie me?”

  Brad tugged at the yucca ropes and felt the painful scrape. His arms were bound behind him, and his shoulders ached horribly. His ankles were also tied together, and he couldn’t stretch out his legs unless he lay on his back and lifted his feet into the air, crushing his hands. Most of the time he curled with his knees to his chest, in a hole under a mesquite bush, perhaps a collapsed badger den that Jon had found and furiously enlarged. Brad groaned and tried not to wake up. He had already spent some of yesterday in the sun without water, and he dreaded the next long day, when the flies would come and torture him with their prickles, their bites, their lazy walking on his burning skin. The flies would not kill him. The sun would kill him. Even so, he dreamed of a horse tail.

  Einstein’s consciousness shimmered and looked inward. What did it care about lazy flies? Einstein had a big decision to make: Should he dissolve into all of consciousness or resume the habit of himself? Albert Einstein thought deeply about this.

  But the statue of Marcus Aurelius came to life and embraced Brad. “My poor boy. I think of you so often. You and I are so much alike.”

  Lucia was shaking Brad’s arm.

  “Where is he?” Brad opened his eyes but couldn’t see much without his glasses and with his head cracking open, krack, krack, krack. Was he in the middle of a thunderstorm? In fact, he seemed to have his face pressed into earth. Grass and dirt fell from his eyes and nose as he strained upward.

  Lucia’s voice was close, next to the shallow pit. “He went to get water.”

  Water!

  “How is Clare? The baby?”

  “Sshhh!”

  “What is he going to do with her? With me?”

  “Quiet now.”

  “I’m thirsty.”

  Later Brad woke for a brief lucid moment and realized that this conversation had never happened. He would not have been able to speak to Lucia, to ask her the questions that swarmed him like flies, because his throat was too parched, his mouth sewed shut with a dry paste. But something else had happened, obviously. Now there was an uncomfortable weight against his back and some new unwelcome warmth against his skin. He pushed against the weight and felt an answering push. Perhaps the badger had come back.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CLARE

  Clare’s waters broke, drenching her thighs and feet, splattering on the dirt and yellow grass. Her uterus contracted strongly, and she lay down on the ground and felt a rush of gladness. Okay, she said to the new baby, if you insist. If you must. If you really want this now. At last, it had begun. At last, it was nearly over. She was tired to death of lumbering about like a giant beaver on land, awkward and grotesque, her weight in front of her. Her uterus contracted, and she made a noise, happy. Now she could focus on something other than worrying if this child would be healthy. She could stop thinking about blue faces and gasps for air. She could stop thinking about Jon and Elise and the Round River people and her mother and grandmother. She could focus on the pain. There it was. A jab, a stab. What a relief. She had something to do now.

  Clare stumbled to the nearest juniper tree and let Brad build a nest around her, yucca stalks and yellow grass and bent branches. Walls against the dry wind. Lucia swept the ground under the tree free of needles and leaf litter and put down fresh grass as a new floor. The smell was lovely. So familiar.

  At first the contractions came hard and fast, and that was good. But then they stopped, and that made Clare nervous. She lay under the shade of the tree, sweating in the summer heat, feeling nervous. What if the baby was like Elise, with a damaged heart? What if damaged hearts were the only thing she could make as a mother? Who would gently smother the child? Not Brad, Clare knew. Lucia? Luke? And then—would Brad and Dog try to bring back a golden baby shimmering consciousness? Absolutely not, Clare thought, sitting up in agitation and half falling over. They couldn’t! They shouldn’t. They wouldn’t. Where would it all end? What had she done, bringing back Elise?

  Her uterus contracted. She gasped.

  She lay back down, gasping. This was good. This was better than thinking.

  She lay on her side. She didn’t want to get up, as Lucia suggested.

  She didn’t want to walk around.

  She didn’t want to crouch on all fours.

  She wanted to stay where she was, with the pain.

  She began pushing, but it wasn’t going to be that easy. Sometimes she whimpered, not because she was asking for help but because it felt good to whimper, to complain, to let herself loosen, a little out of control. It was better not to be in too much control. Let the muscles loosen. Let the body take over. Cry out! Complain! Be a little different from the usual Clare, who hadn’t complained even as a child when she broke her arm or as an adult when a stallion dislocated her shoulder and bruised her purple and black from chest to thigh. She had been too self-conscious to cry, too proud, too strong. But now those qualities were not what she needed. Now she needed to focus on something other than herself. Now she needed to be a little weak, letting herself relax and weaken, letting the baby do what it wanted to do.

  Lucia left the shelter to talk to Elise and Brad. Clare complained about that and felt resentful. She wanted Lucia for herself. There wasn’t enough room for the others.

  Then Clare decided that she did want to be on all fours.

  But that seemed to change the gravity of the earth.

  Then she decided that she wanted to squat and press her back against the rough bark of the juniper tree. A branch almost poked her eye, and Lucia cut away more of the branches, giving her and Clare more space, filling the air with the smell of sap, the sharpness of juniper. It was almost over!

  But now Brad was gone. Where had Brad gone? Water? He was getting water? Was that really necessary? But she couldn’t wait for Brad. She didn’t want this other person inside her anymore. She wanted to be separate. She wanted it to be over.

  “Where’s Brad?” Clare asked again, between harsh pants that came from everywhere in her body, all her body a breath.

  “Let me do this first,” Lucia said and guided the baby out. “It’s a girl,” Lucia whispered. “Oh, she’s so mad.” Clare opened her eyes when she heard the furious wail wah, wah, wah, wah. “What a temper,” Lucia rejoiced and smiled hugely at Clare, who smiled hugely back and slid down the tree bark, very slowly, while Lucia cut the cord and cleaned the baby of Clare’s blood and the baby’s waxy coating. The little girl sighed with the loss of the womb, her anger turned to resignation.

  Lucia gave the baby to Clare to nurse, and Clare pinched a nipple, smearing drops of watery blue colostrum over the tiny lips, the thin liquid rich with nutrients, better now than the milk that would come later. Lucia waited for the afterbirth. Clare stared at the baby. Until, in a burst of energy, the newborn grabbed hold of Clare and sucked hard, and Clare startled, and the two women laughed. This was such a strong little girl! She was small—Clare had already noted that, surprisingly small—and
raw-skinned and ugly for having been born a bit early. Her hair hadn’t grown in yet, and her eyes were gray. Her tiny face scrunched with the effort of sucking. But she didn’t let go, and she didn’t gasp for air.

  The two women were blissful just watching her. Clare felt more contractions, and Lucia said, “That’s fine now. Almost done.” And Clare had another desire to push and another, and Lucia was ready with fresh grass, and then Lucia was staring up at Clare, over Clare’s still mounded stomach.

  “That’s not the placenta. I think there’s another baby.”

  Clare shook her head. Not true.

  “No, I see a buttock. It’s coming the wrong way.”

  No one in Clare’s tribe had ever birthed twins. Clare had never met a twin, although she knew of twin teenagers in Colorado who had been caught and killed with their family in a stampede of buffalo. A few times, occasionally, a midwife suspected that a second fetus had died and been absorbed in the womb, but that was always early in the pregnancy. Twins were so rare. No one had mentioned the possibility to Clare, and she felt surprisingly indignant. Why hadn’t anyone told her this could happen?

  Another pain, a new wave, and Lucia took the baby from her breast.

  “Am I going to die?” Clare wondered.

  “It’s a breech birth,” Lucia snapped, “not a snakebite.”

  She began to massage Clare’s stomach, trying to push the child’s buttocks up and to the side, turning the baby around, pushing sharp shoulders and a head against Clare’s intestines and diaphragm. Clare was being wrung from the inside, the way her mother and grandmother squeezed yucca leaves and beat them, wringing the rough loops of fiber, squeezing and twisting.

  “This isn’t working,” Lucia said. “I’m going to put my hand in now.”

  Clare gave her death-shriek. Rabbits shrieked like this when they were being torn apart by hyenas. Clare remembered that sound. For a moment, she looked down from a branch in the juniper tree and saw herself, her mouth hanging open, her sweaty naked belly, and the top of Lucia’s gray head. Lucia’s shoulders twisted as she put her hand into Clare and tore her apart. It was such a shame. Clare had wanted to say good-bye to Elise. To Brad. To the new baby. She was so sorry to leave them.

  At some point in the next two hours, Clare didn’t die. She knew that vaguely but wasn’t always grateful. Then she was grateful, holding the baby boy as he also nursed at her breast, more gently than the girl, for he seemed as exhausted as Clare was. Still he sucked and slept and woke to suck again, healthy like his sister, who snored contentedly at the other breast. Clare and Lucia were too tired to laugh, although Clare felt as though her body had been undone and then stitched back together with something like joy. Bright threads of joy held her painfully in place.

  Lucia left the juniper tree shelter and Clare slept, too, curled on her side, her arm lightly covering the babies next to her.

  And then Jon was there, taking one of them away.

  Clare struggled awake when she felt the boy’s absence. The girl yawned and stretched at Clare’s breast, getting ready for the next adventure of the day—to nurse again. But her brother was gone. He was moving through the air, and then he was being held against Jon’s chest, although Jon was not looking down at him and marveling and adoring. Instead, Jon kept his eyes on Clare’s face.

  “Wake up,” Jon said.

  “Give him to me,” Clare croaked, her mouth so dry. She struggled to sit and see Jon better. Here she was, still under the juniper tree, the smell of birth stronger than before, the smell of her own skin stronger than before. The little room of green had been just the right size for her and Lucia, but now Jon made the space seem unbearably cramped, his face too close as he knelt beside her and held her son.

  “Where’s Brad?” Clare asked. “Where’s Lucia?”

  Where is Elise? she thought.

  The baby boy began to squirm. Perhaps the pressure of Jon’s hands wasn’t quite right. Perhaps the heart in Jon’s chest, which the boy could hear and feel, was beating too fast. Soon, Clare knew, the little face would pucker. He would wail, wah wah wah wah wah wah wah, surprisingly loud for such a tiny body.

  “Give him to me,” she urged.

  “Your … Brad’s gone,” the hunter hesitated before saying his name. His voice went up slightly in pitch. “We fought and he ran away. He ran to save himself. He knows the Council and the elders are angry. He knows he has to answer for what he’s done.”

  Clare tried to understand even as she watched the boy and brought the girl into her breast more tightly. Quickly, thankfully, her daughter latched onto the nipple. Already, so soon, she was skilled at eating. Meanwhile her brother was moving his head and mouth urgently to the side, searching for a nipple of his own, trying to suckle Jon. The hunter didn’t seem to notice.

  Clare knew, of course, that Jon had found them yesterday. After the second baby was turned—after she didn’t die when Lucia put her hand inside her—the midwife had begun acting strangely, going outside, talking to someone. “It’s just Brad,” Lucia had said then because, after all, there was still another baby to be born and Clare didn’t need any sudden bad news. But once the boy was cleaned up and the placenta out and put aside, once the children were safe, small but strong with all their fingers and toes and with clearly healthy lungs—Lucia confessed. She didn’t know where Brad had gone, or Elise, but Jon was here. Jon had been sent by the Council and the elders to bring them back to the lab.

  “I need Lucia,” Clare said to Jon, trying to think, watching her son, willing the boy not to cry, willing Jon to give him back. Had Brad really run away? It didn’t seem likely. Probably he was close by, also watching and waiting. Brad would have some plan. He would keep Elise safe.

  The hunter stared at the girl on Clare’s breast as if she were a piece of fat sizzling on the fire. Clare had to wonder at the man’s stubbornness: she could see even now that the boy and girl had Brad’s genes. They would have his dark skin, his dark hair and dark eyes, his long body. It hardly seemed possible that Jon still hoped these children were his own, even if he had agreed to claim them.

  “I know he forced you,” Jon was saying carefully. “You had no choice, not in any of this. You didn’t leave me by choice.”

  “Jon,” Clare put out a hand, reaching for her son.

  “And so I am going to take you back into my tent and I am going to explain to the Council and to the elders what I saw here.”

  Again the hunter’s voice rose in pitch. He clenched the arm holding the infant against his chest. As Clare watched, the boy arched his back.

  Jon continued talking, ignoring her outstretched hand. He had something to say. This speech had been planned. “You stayed with these people because you were alone. You were pregnant. You were frightened. You had no choice.” Suddenly, the hunter fairly spat at her, “What they did to Elise! It’s unspeakable.”

  In the dim light under the tree, Clare strained to study Jon more closely. He had always kept the skin on his face shaved clean, what many men did to show their skill with a knife. But now the hunter’s beard sprouted in patches, uneven and untrimmed. His eyes were puffy, darkened underneath. He held her son but didn’t look at him.

  “Yes,” Clare said softly. “That’s right. You’re right.”

  Jon wrinkled his nose as if the smell of the birthing bed was becoming too much.

  “Where’s Lucia?” Clare repeated the question.

  The hunter shifted his eyes. “She went to get water. She’ll be back soon. We leave tomorrow.”

  “I just gave birth,” Clare explained the obvious, thinking to give Brad more time to plan, “and the babies …”

  Unexpectedly, it was the girl who stopped nursing and began to fuss, which tipped her brother into a wail, his small fists coming up in the air, his small legs kicking out at Jon’s chest. Jon jerked as if a stick of firewood had come alive in his hands. Instinctively he gave the screaming baby to Clare, who enfolded her son and found him a nipple. The boy was abruptly
quiet, but the girl began to cry more seriously.

  The hunter passed a hand over his eyes. “I’m here to take you away,” Jon repeated. He seemed to grit his teeth. “You and the children. We need to get you away from here. This place is … haunted.”

  He means Elise, Clare thought. That’s how he thinks of her.

  Clare slept again but only for a little, not nearly long enough. Then Jon was back, grabbing her sandals and Lucia’s bag of medicine, picking up the sling with its half image of a swallow and pulling Clare out of the grassy bed so that she barely caught the twins before they tumbled to the ground. She thought he was going to strike her, and she bent over the babies to protect them. But he was dragging her outside.

  “No!” she screamed.

  “Fire!” Jon shouted. “Put on your shoes.”

  The sun was so bright. Clare squinted at the horizon.

  “Can’t you smell it?” Jon sounded excited.

  Clare could barely smell anything but herself. She clutched the whimpering babies more firmly. She squinted and sniffed. She steadied her trembling arms and legs and sniffed again. Yes, there it was. Yes, she couldn’t not smell it. Smoke.

  Another Confession, submitted by Carlos Salas

  I love you. You have been my teacher for five years now, ever since I was a boy. I’ve only seen a picture of you on the screen of my solarcomp, the one where you are smiling right into the camera on your own solarcomp and your hair is down and not in a braid, the one where anyone can see that you are smiling but still sad about something. I love you and it doesn’t matter anymore if you know this since you have disappeared and probably won’t ever read what I send you. You will never know how I feel. In a way this has given me the freedom to write it down.

  Another Assignment, submitted by Alice Featherstone

  I hate to keep complaining, but I really think it is wrong that you’ve gone off without a word. I suppose I should be honest and admit that I was getting to like your assignments, and I was looking forward to the next one. It seems to me that I think better when writing and that I hardly know what I think until I am writing what I think.

 

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