Little Sisters of the Apocalypse

1

Context: In bad times writers have resources. K. attends her mother, who is dying. The first thing to die is the will. The second will be the intellect. The body will take longer. Her daughter turns to narrative. The object? Name a place. People it. Go there.

~

Drawn back and back again to the parched lakefront that surrounds the women’s colony, Chag paces her balcony like a widow’s walk, stalking without knowing why she is so restless. There is a difference today, a shift in the light or a faint disturbance in the air, the stir of impending change. It brings her to the rail with her arms spread, leaning out like a brilliant figurehead, classic: woman, staring out to sea. What’s out there? What?

What is it? Toby?

Nothing moves on the bleached lakebed and there is nothing in the sky but the unremitting sun. Nothing. But there is a change in the air today, a hum or vibration that suggests something is coming. The men, on their way back into the territory? The army returning? Chag does not know.

The prospect leaves her both joyful and frightened.

Without them the island is so peaceful!

The men are all gone, at least all the men the women care about. They are off at some war. It is the ultimate sexist act. Understand, the women of Schell Isle are alone here because the men are away at the last great adventure, the one place you can’t go. Still Chag is distracted, caught—short—by intimations. There is something going on out there.

~

HUDN HUDN. RMMM RMMM. RMMMMMMM. In an underground garage a world away from here the air vibrates with the rumble of motors.

~

It’s getting weird out. We need to beef up the armaments. Courtney Ravenal comes in at least once a week with this. Chag’s beautiful, bellicose second-in-command is intent on arming the battlements, preparing to repel all boarders.

Chag sighs. Now what is it?

Courtney hisses, They could come back any time.

She and Courtney tug back and forth over everything—principles, issues, the laws of this strange city. The unidentifiable but palpable change in the atmosphere—the disturbance in the air—has left Chag trembling at the possibilities. Stirred, expectant, she studies her second in command and decides to tell her nothing. Chag says carefully, What makes you think so?

Something I found, she says angrily, Some kind of warning.

Chag says, What are you afraid of?

Courtney taps the Colt she wears strapped to her thigh. You know. The Return. She twists her scarf as if it’s her lover’s neck she is wringing. Shit! They try to come back, we blow them out of the water.

Toby. No! We love them.

Speak for yourself, bitch.

Then they love us, Chag says, shaken.

What makes you so sure? Courtney produces an object so alien that Chag feels doubts like licking flames in her belly. Look at this! It is a fetish: hair, glass shards and gems wired to bone in an odd pattern.

Chag knows better than to tell Courtney that she too has something unusual to report. She dissembles. Could be anything. It could. Courtney’s always coming in with invented crises, angry and desperate for action.

It’s a fucking warning. I say we arm. Blow them out of the water. This is an unintended irony. The lake dried up years ago.

Stop, Chag says. Relax. It’s nothing.

You want to lie down and roll over for them?

Chag is perhaps too firm. I said, it’s nothing. You don’t even know what you’re afraid of, she says, dismissing her. This is a lie. She does know what Courtney is afraid of. Courtney’s afraid of the same thing Chag’s afraid of.

The fault line in her heart. Toby. Of course she wants him back. But with him come love and loss, conflict, confusion and disorder. Without him, she is autonomous.

God she misses him.

~

—But look at this nice safe place I made for you. Departing, he raised the goggles on his leather flier’s helmet/ brilliant in his silver suit he lifted the faceplate/ threw his boat cloak over his shoulder/ put his cap on her head and hugged her so hard that her chin hit the gold braid on his shoulderboard. Then he put her in her place. Sweet talk keeps her there.

—You’d be so nice to come home to.

~

The island is far from the unknown front where the men are fighting. In the ultimate refinement of wartime technology they keep their location secret.

Descended from the first gated communities designed to insulate the prosperous, Schell Isle is still and beautiful. A manmade paradise, it sits like a gem in the middle of an artificial lake. When the men left, the lake was filled. Blue water glistened in a thousand points under the desert sun. In those days heat mirages shimmered above blue waters. Never mind whose territory the men flooded to create this or who they had to displace. Never mind the Outlaw family, exiled to their barrio; nobody cares about the poor. They won’t be back; security is superb.

It’s as different from the smoke and blood and confusion of the front as life from death. The men say they hate what they’re doing but they love it. It assuages their guilt to think of the women they leave behind as safe in beautiful surroundings.

—This place is forever.

The men congratulated themselves and left. As they did, the lake went dry. To the women the receding water was like a reproach. This is what happens without a man around to take care of things.

Even though the water is gone the women prefer to live as if it still exists, pining on private docks, listening as the dry breeze whistles in long-dead cattails. Although the lakebed is flat and smooth the women cross the bleached surface by causeway. They say this is because they can’t afford car trouble with the men gone; they say it’s only prudent, but Chag knows better.

It’s the possibilities.

What lies just beneath the sandy crust? Perhaps it’s something huge and omnivorous, hunched to break the surface. Enemies may storm the electronic barrier at the perimeter and come swarming down on you or there may be supernatural forces at work: nature poised to avenge the families who used to make their homes here. Broach the lakebed and water may gush forth under the wheels of your BMW like the Red Sea drowning the pharaoh’s chariots.

This is not really what the women are afraid of.

The women are afraid if they set foot on the dry lakebed they may rouse and summon legions. One misstep and the sky will turn black with the planes of returning men.

~

About the men.

The women are, at best, ambivalent. Do we want him back? Yes.

No. Look what he has made of us. Potential widows and orphans. Everything waits on the Return, for which no date has been announced.

The girl he left behind. Sure. Fixed in place by waiting.

Do we want him back? It is an open question.

It’s so peaceful without him. No jealousy, little friction, no yelling. Nobody to come in the door and throw his things down and bypass How’ve you been? to ask without even looking at her, What’s for dinner?

~

A breeze lifts dried palm fronds; small creatures scuttle through black shadows and birds plummet, flattening themselves in the white sand, struck down by intimations of some unseen power.

In the sunshot houses and shops of Schell Isle the other women lose track of what they’re doing. They stop in the streets, putting down briefcases and shopping bags. Distracted, they lift their heads: Who called? Nobody answers.

They’re afraid to ask: Do you hear it too? Nobody wants to admit it. Oh it was just. Nobody knows just what it was. They shrug and push back their hair and pick up whatever they were doing.

~

Chag’s house is the biggest in the women’s colony; her balcony is the highest. If something’s out there she will be the first to see it. Something she can neither see nor hear makes her whip her head around. What? There’s no sound but the hiss of wind in dried palm fronds and the murmur of the island machinery. The manmade vista never changes.

Still! She says aloud, Toby?

Nobody answers but something makes her shiver. Intent, Chag leans out with arms spread, with her eyes wide and her mouth open.

What is it?

The glistening sand of the dried lakebed gives back nothing. There’s no change in the humming electronic barrier and no activity at the tollgate the women maintain to protect the causeway.

What is it anyway? What is it that stirs Chag and sets her spinning, trying to locate it? What excites the other women for reasons they can’t name; what makes them so uneasy? Nothing you can identify. Some subtle change in the tempo or the light? No.

It’s nothing Chag can name. Or is it? My God, she thinks and the implications make her belly tremble. Is it them? What if it really is them? What if they’re really coming?

~

It doesn’t matter who the women are in real life, right now all they are is waiting. This is what wars make of women: prisoners of waiting. In real life Chag is a poet, but now she’s cursed by bitter, inescapable rhymes; they’re all that come.

In a flash the runner stumbles;

That’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Like the others Chag said goodbye to her life partner, her loving adversary Toby Hagen for, she thought, the good of their country. For once she and her beloved have left off the collision of yang/yin, will and intellect, the lifelong tangle of conflicting egos. She put her arms around his neck and managed not to cry Don’t go, knowing at the same time that war is more important to men than any love affair. What’s love, when lives are at stake? Kissed him goodbye and let him go.

And tried not to resent it.

It’s been five years. For five years she and the other women have been waiting. Sometimes Chag thinks waiting is all they are. The war is like a foreign country they’re barred from entering. Watching TV nightly news, tapes of blurry frontline coverage beamed in to satisfy them that there’s a reason for all this, Chag scans the fuzzy faces like a speed reader, looking for Toby. Is this all I am? she thinks. Just waiting?

~

Marking time until it’s over.

~

Walk out on her, put her in place and close the door for five years. Come back and expect to find her where you put her with her arms wide and the place unchanged. Expect her to turn on like the light in the refrigerator when you remember to open it. Shining for you and you only.

~

Listen to some of the things the men say to you when they go out the door with no set return date and no promises.

I love you but I have to do this. Sure.

I’m doing it for you. Look at him: natty in that uniform, in love with sleek weapons too secret to describe to you. That’s classified. When he walks out that door he will forget you.

He may give you a present, a token of ownership to mark you, service emblem in gold, class ring in miniature—his thing, scaled down. Wear this for me.

This is how he leaves in place the apparatus to keep his systems going: I’m counting on you to take care of things.

See him kiss you the way Toby Hagen kissed Chag when he put her down in this splendid house and said, Take over for me, OK?

Chag didn’t say: What if I don’t want to?

Toby didn’t say: Too bad. He didn’t have to. He only said, I know you’ll take good care of things.

Which is what finds Charlotte Hagen in charge here, taking over for Toby. A thwarted poet, she is Acting Governor of Schell Isle. Not governor. The nameplate he had made for her reads Acting Governor. She maintains systems and wrangles over policy with Courtney. Courtney, who goes to extremes, wants Chag to govern with a heavier hand. Control, she growls, without explaining what she thinks needs controlling. If there isn’t trouble, Court will make it.

Therefore Chag must stay ten jumps ahead, anticipating contingencies, making decisions before Courtney can preempt them.

She’s tied to the phone and the computer, doing Toby’s job in Toby’s absence when all she really wants is to find the right words for things and set them marching in order. She never wanted this. She’d like to be herself—pure Chag—without complications. She’d like to read Chag’s mind when it is empty and uncluttered.

But until or unless he comes back to release her she is this. Custodian. Prisoner. Waiting isn’t good for her.

~

Beware. With responsibility comes power. When he comes back he will find you are different.

Responsibility forges you.

So does independence. Absence. Loss. Do they make you bitter? Released from the daily imperatives of life with their mates and lovers, released from the responsibility of a paired soul, the women are changing.

From the beginning Chag worried; is Toby all right? Hungry? Hurt? Is he warm enough? Then he was declared missing in action. God, has the war killed him? She’d just like