By River Adams

Featured Art: The Anthro-technological Convergence by Brooke Ripley

1.

It happened again last night: some kids vandalized the Manhattan Wall. One sprawling sentence in black spraypaint, thick and shiny and fresh as darkness must be in hell. I thought, though, that the handwriting was not without flair.

This has been happening more and more in city preserves all over the world, so much that my order now has convents with wall-care ministries in New Orleans, Boston, St. Petersburg, Helsinki, Tokyo, and Calcutta, and expanding to London. The Keepers of Memory and the Sisters of Divine Purity are covering the other walled cities.

It became my full-time ministry right out of novitiate: repairing microcracks in the glass panels, thudded out by the tech that the laity smuggles in from outside; washing off signs in magic marker and cartoon film while the caricatures still move under my rags. Now and then, breathing on the contours of a hatred somebody left behind, I wonder if there isn’t a kind of holy rush in blasphemy—breaking the curfew, furtive feet treading upon forbidden ground, smelling the cool night air on your skin, hearing the hiss of the paint against the Wall and the slosh of the ocean on the other side. It’s like writing your rage on the water itself. There’s danger and freedom and wrath by the Wall at night.

The graffiti I’m cleaning today says PRESERVE THIS, followed by a detailed depiction of an erect cock, complete with little hairs and delicate folds of skin. I’m over halfway done, only the picture is left to scrape, but time is getting into late morning now, and sluggish waves of heat are pushing from the asphalt. They brush by the shimmering glass and soak into my habit like sweat, and they bounce off the steel ribs of the meridian dividers that rise out of the ground and merge into the Wall in gigantic curves of exponential growth. Standing between the dividers, I feel like the ghost of Jonah inside a dead whale. Soapy water pours down my arms, off the elbows into my sleeves, and weighs them down— warm, unclean soddenness.

A few feet away, the guard is fidgeting with his shoulders and eyebrows. Salt must be stinging his eyes. He is scrawny, terse, and kind, with coarse, hoary hair that sticks out from under his Kevlar helmet and over his sandy-brown, wrinkled neck in bristly bunches, like desert grass. We’ve been stationed together so many times that I know things about him. He has a daughter out there somewhere. Her mother rolled her up in a blanket and took her away, and he watched, standing out of the way, in a corner. He asked her why, and she said you’re a nincompoop, and he didn’t know what it meant, an old-timey word. He knows it now. He likes guard duty because nothing ever happens. They wanted to promote him to corporal, but he said no. Too much responsibility. These are the things I know. And that his name is Trelis.

“Hey, Trelis, what time is it?”

“Time to finish the job, Sister. My sergeant always says.”

Trelis will stand on the molten blacktop in full gear for as long as it takes me to return the Wall to its long-ago deflowered serenity. I hike up my sleeves, dunk the scraper in the bucket, and choose a spot on the spraypainted gonad where I will start. I must admit a mastery in the drawing. It is completely realistic. Graphic. Offensive. Elegant. Erotic. Pornographic. The hand that painted it never hesitated or took a wrong turn. Through the Wall, I see a vague form of some sea creature, a shark or a dolphin. From the other side, it approaches the center of a drop-shaped testicle, coalesces like a 3D image coming into focus inside a frame, then turns with a dismissive wave of the bifurcated tail and is gone into the blue. I watch its absence for a moment and bathe in a gust of wind, letting the pungent swirls of November air carried over from New York wash over me: trash, tar, antifreeze. Something else, closer. I think the vandals might have pissed on the Wall for an olfactory exclamation mark.

I dunk my scraper again and press it hard against the black, bottomless line. It is smooth; the scraper slips and squeaks. Behind me, pilgrims are strolling, scurrying, crowding against the temporary barrier with the orange sign: Keep Out. Wall Under Care. I can hear murmur and giggling, a child calling out “Mamma, look, look!” For normal people, who take family for granted, this morning’s entertainment is the sight of a white-clad nun with her face in an enormous cartoon scrotum, rubbing away, and a penis that’s pointing straight at the armed guard with his rifle resting between his feet, business end up.

“Hey, Trelis,” I say. “Maybe you should stand somewhere else.” He looks at me over his shoulder, uncomprehending.

2.

When official fertility and labor-aptitude questionnaires asked her if she had ever been pregnant, Jazz sometimes checked “yes” and sometimes “no.” She did not do this out of any desire to deceive or any mental inconsistency but only according to her mood, as she always wanted to be honest when filling out official questionnaires. And so, whenever she came upon this question, she made herself remember the seven days when she knew she was pregnant, and the one day she bled, and the thing she imagined had torn away from her in the course of that bleeding, as she squirmed in the tub already feeling the tearing of the flesh, and all the days after, when she was decidedly not pregnant. And every time, having remembered, she answered the question in the way that came to her most sincerely on that particular day.

Do you have any children? No.

Have you ever been pregnant? No. Or—sometimes—yes.

For months, no one from Labor or Population Growth would confront her about this apparent contradiction in her official questionnaires; no one would ask for clarification or for a follow-up.

“Nobody reads these things,” Jazz said to Mumzy. “How would you know?” Mumzy snapped.

Mumzy had acquired a habit for snapping in her middle-aged years. She thought it would save her from being pitiful.

“I know,” Jazz said. “I just know.”

Mumzy smirked and began to feed Pops spoonfuls of bright-yellow synthe-fruit purée. She had also acquired a habit for smirking.

3.

Jasmine enjoyed going to church all through her childhood. She must have been four when her parents first took her to Mass, and she trotted between them unknowingly, paying most attention, as four-year-olds are wont to do, to the things of little substance: Pops’s glossy brown shoes that made ticklish sounds on the steps; his rough hands with calluses that rubbed against her fingers; her own rustling dress with a pink and lacy prickly collar, which she kept patting away from her neck; and then the thing that captivated and overwhelmed her most of all: the smell of incense. It filled the air in the church and turned it into a fantastical world, and it was indescribably new, warm and spicy and smoky, with an odd freshness to it.

“I like how church smells!” she said to Mumzy.

“Of course!” Music drones were blaring the opening hymn above their heads. Mumzy stooped down to her ear and whispered hoarsely and loudly into a trumpet she’d made of both her hands. “God knew a little girl named Jasmine would be coming to church today, so He made it smell like Jasmine!” Mumzy straightened out and smiled upon her from the height of divine knowledge, and Jasmine inhaled her personal divine smell and felt special.

4.

I finish scraping the penis tip off the glass by midday, the mellow time. The preserve is nearly empty of people, and the park that runs along the Memory Wall is filled with plush, wrapping heat. Nothing is straight or horizontal or vertical or steady but shimmering and scorching and inhuman. It isn’t safe. Only soldiers, nuns, and emergency workers are out in the sunlight into midday—the handful of us made disposable by nature and despair.

I gather my scrapers into the bucket with suds at the bottom and glance one more time at the Wall. It is pristine and greenish to the water’s surface, then sky-blue up to the massive tube of the top railing, high above our heads. Only the meridian-parallel grid interrupts the transparency, and the barely discernible etchings of the Earth’s land masses as they looked in the time of the Old World. Islands upon islands upon islands. Alternative continents. The teal wild of the ocean is cool, unreachable, and vast beyond them. It is a bewildering notion that too many people crowded the earth at one time, and women bore children into middle age. In the time before gigastorms, health riots, the three-degree mark, and Autoimmunity. Before the Big Quakes and ozone redepletion. Before the Fertility Crisis. When this city was teeming with life.

If I turn around, with my back to the Wall, the city will look vulnerable, the unthinkable mass of the sea poised on all sides to swallow it like a tsunami frozen in mid-motion, nothing between us and the flood but the wave cutters and thick glass. It is fortified, pressure-resistant, indestructible. But then, this forest of concrete and tunnels and alleys and steeples is not a city anymore. It’s a lab inside a cathedral inside a fortress, and the flood’s already come and gone. I wish I could have known it before the Wall.

“Shall we?” I say. Trelis picks up the rifle and breaks his stance with a groan. He leaves behind tiny sweat puddles that outline the soles of his boots.

At the municipal water pump, we input our caretaker codes, swallow our daily salt pills and solar prophylactics, and wash up: our feet and hands, arms, faces, and necks. The water is cold and heavenly, and I want to take off my scapular, jump under the stream in nothing but a tunic, to soak completely in the sparkle and frolic and dazzle of it. I want to take off the tunic, too, and jump under the stream naked and wash off the sweat and soap, the filth of today’s job.

Fresh water doesn’t smell bitter.

Trelis takes off his Kevlar and sticks his head under the pump, emerges dripping and squinting, joy in every drop, stretches with delicious fatigue. We have until the evening pilgrimage before we must return to our respective homes—he, the barracks; I, the convent—so we lean against the damp, shady wall of the wash-up nook and draw hieroglyphs with our heels in the puddle we just made, hiding from the passage of time.

“Hey, Trelis,” I say. “I thought they were moving you to dispatch. I thought you’d be in your cushy office job by now.”

He shifts, but here in the shadow, nothing is embarrassing. Nothing is new. It is as though we had talked like this countless times.

“Too complicated for me,” he says. “Me, I need things clear. Nun clean wall, soldier guard nun.” He nudges my shoulder. “What about you, Sister? You’re a sharp kid, what are you doing in this god-forsaken place, cleaning crap off a shrine that’s only there for old religious farts, who want to cling to the good old days?”

“I am a religious fart, aren’t I?” I tap my coif with an index finger. He stares for a few seconds. “No, you’re not.”

5.

In second grade, she did a show-and-tell on the subject of her digi-poodle Flopsy’s being a reincarnation of Jesus. Flopsy was cute and kind, and she thought it was rather a compliment to Jesus, but the teacher videoed her parents and called her a blasphemer into their floating 3D faces. She listened to the adults’ huffy, mechanical voices and ruffled Flopsy’s synthetic curls. In eighth grade, she dyed her skin a purple-orange swirl most reminiscent of a grape-and-tangerine summer slushy. In eleventh grade, she had sex with three boyfriends, steadily and patiently, without drama, until she finally got pregnant, but told no one. It was going to be just hers, just her secret pride for a while. She must have been the first of her classmates—it was right on time. It was even still early.

The church ladies had everybody’s business in mind and a list of people going to hell, and even though the ladies were only familiar with public manifestations of her tiny rebellions—mercurythm band jackets, pierced forehead, and spotty attendance at Mass—every so often they expressed their commiseration to her parents in nostalgic exclamations of judgment and consolation: “She used to be such a faithful little girl!” They said this at every new infraction, as if it marked a downfall from a heretofore unstained path to sainthood. Just wait, you sanctimonious cows, she thought. You’ll sing a different tune when I announce about the baby.

Then everything happened at once. A subtle, pulling cramp came first, a sensation so familiar and innocent that she forgot to worry—PMS, she thought in passing. Until the pain hit.

She went over to tell boyfriend number three as soon as she climbed out of the tub, still achy and woozy and weak in the knees, the piercings rubbing against her damp, swollen face. He said, “That’s crappy, poodle. If you couldn’t keep the first one, that’s probably it for you.”

He was right, of course, and she knew it. Everybody knew how Autoimmunity worked: you get pregnant or you don’t, and then you keep it or you don’t. You pretty much get one chance. She just didn’t need to hear it then, from the one person who was supposed to tell her that screw the world, miracles happen.

She stormed out, flailing, desperate for a semblance of hope. At home, parents were waiting. They’d be there for her with hugging arms and hollow words, lifted from the Fertility Department brochures. What she needed, they couldn’t give her.

It was Tuesday; the churches were locked. At the nearest flyer depot, she picked out a short-range flyer and, three hours down the coast, found an orangery that grew jasmine. She had loved this flower gratefully, intimately all her life—or the idea of it. Her special name, her special smell, her direct bond with God. Her proof that there was a meaning in it all. A reason for it all. But she’d never seen it in person. Never had the need.

The orangery attendant pointed without turning to a long row of tables by the wall, a cloud of jasmine hovering above it. It grew in constellations, galaxies of minuscule white starlets that peeked through the juicy, deep-dark, pregnant foliage. She closed her eyes and let her face fall into the tickly surface of the jasmine bush, inhaled the odor. It was sweet, tranquil, head-spinning. It was beautiful.

It smelled nothing like church.

Mumzy was waiting up when she finally made it home that night, spent from her rage and confusion and self-flagellation, on the verge of explosion. Her name was no longer Jasmine, she declared. Just call her Jazz.

They had it out in a messy roil of screams and accusations. “If protecting my child is the worst thing I’ve done as a mother!” “How do I know what else you’re lying about?” “What in the hell kind of name is Jazz anyway?” Pops wheeled his chair to the kitchen threshold and stayed at the edge of the fury, moving only his eyebrows and fingers to the swells and ebbs of the women’s battle. He could still move his arms then, and he could talk, but he did not.

That night, for the first time in her life, she didn’t go to him afterwards to cry it out. She used to hide her face in his softening, dystrophic lap, to complete the arguments she’d never had the presence of mind to formulate while the duel raged with Mumzy, and peace would come while she hushed under his caressing hand. She knew Pops would wait for her in his favorite corner of the kitchen, tucked under the thinning, red-and-black plaid blanket that hung off the armrests. He would keep dozing off and waking up, startled by the chimes of the clock. But that night, she didn’t want to be calmed, and she didn’t know how to tell him why. It had been twenty-four hours since the miscarriage.

After this, Jazz didn’t stop going to church altogether. Mass was no longer a celebration—it was lacking in mystery, lacking in wonder, and lacking in truth—but there was something soothing in empty ritual. Familiarity and predictability. A year later, she would find herself once again grieving and casting about for comfort, and then comfort would come to her unexpectedly in imagining the routine of religious life. She could lose herself, she thought, in going through the same motions as the person on her left and the person on her right, every day until death. And there would be no more loss. And no more change. In the end, she preferred the company of those who were bound by the immediacy of the present, because they didn’t ask about the past.

6.

Everything seemed to change after Jazz had mustered up the courage to register the miscarriage with the Population Growth Department and given up on planning for the future. Everyone began to ask endlessly about children—or maybe they’d been asking all along, and only now she began to notice the questions. Certainly, it was about time, with the ramping up of the 12th-grade parenting classes, which she mostly ditched, and graduation looming, but children appeared to be the only topic on everybody’s mind.

“Miss Jasmine, when are you going to try to give your parents a grandchild?” the church ladies inquired at fall barbeques in honeyed and watermeloned voices. “What happened to that pretty boyfriend?” Mumzy whined, clearing the plates. “I wouldn’t mind you having a kid looking like that!”

“Purchase the database of baby names and cross-reference meanings, culture-specificity, and popularity!” sales drones hollered overhead.

It seemed that, one by one, her fertile classmates were growing bellies and having showers. Hallways, classrooms, the cafeteria buzzed with foreign, excited, and rambling conversations she barely understood about follicles and placentas and antibody prophylactics and amneosomething and holistic education. She was invited into the circles and sat in them politely at first, then made an occasional excuse, and eventually forgot to show up and was courteously forgotten in return.

The infertile began to declare. Their growing support group took up a chunk of the school yard with their Proud Voice installation that looked like a dried-up uterus, and they milled around it, throwing what Jazz suspected to be appraising glances in her direction. She stopped showing up at school. By then, school was the last thing on her mind anyway.

Pops was nearing the end of his life. He had lived longer than most ALS patients do without the fancy treatments, and the last couple of years were messy and destructive. They left Mumzy a droning, elderly stick of a woman with scorched skin, a whitish nest for a hairdo, and a constant fine tremor in the hands.

When he finally died, it was at home. “No doctors,” he said. “We know it’s coming. No sense spending. On a hospital. Just let it happen.” He was propped up in bed, his last pose. Jazz held him by two dry, brownish fingers. Mumzy held her hand and his ankle, nodded. Jazz wondered if Mumzy had heard this from him before, if the two of them had rehearsed it for her benefit.

They didn’t realize what it would be like, though, when it came. How long the agony would be and how visibly painful, how indecently loud the wheezing and shuddering of a body that hadn’t moved in years. The gasping. The spreading bluishness from the lips to the tips of the fingers. How inhumanly long the last exhale. When he was dead, they cried, ugly and unguarded, sobs of grief mixing with sobs of relief.

At the funeral reception, Aunt Gorshie buried her in a hug. Gorshie was Pops’s sister and worked in Siberian China for the Safe Resettlement program, teaching continental life to former coastline dwellers. They had met four times. “You look so much like your father, dear,” she whimpered, and held Jazz’s face in both hands. “Why did you wait to try for a child? He would have been so happy.” Jazz told Mumzy she was joining the Sisters of Perpetual Care on the evening after the funeral, once the guests had cleared out and the two of them were left alone in their empty kitchen. Mumzy listened to the announcement and laughed, then smirked, then frowned. “What the fuck are you talking about? Nunnery? That’s for old women and the infertile girls, and you haven’t even tried yet. You’re not too old. Though I keep telling you, poodle: you will be soon, if you don’t get yourself in gear.”

Jazz tensed at the familiar concoction of longing and nastiness in Mumzy’s tone, but there wasn’t going to be a fight today. She folded her hands before her belly, interlaced her fingers. Would this be her stance from now on? Eyes down, feet together. It felt comfortable. It felt comforting.

From the kitchen table, with a knife in one hand and a piece of pressed apple flavor in the other, her mother eyed her up and down and lowered her voice. “Seriously. You as a nun? Saying rosary and taking orders, sweeping footpaths in some tech-free worship zone that looks like a hundred years ago? That’s almost an oxymoron, Jasmine, bonnie. You don’t mean it.”

Jazz practiced her sweetest prayer voice: “At least I won’t have to answer to fucking Jasmine anymore.”

“Watch it.” Mumzy slumped down in the chair and leaned her head against its back. “One day they will boot you out for your big mouth.” She mimed being booted out with her foot, and for a few seconds they both watched it swing in minute motions, less and less until it came to a rest. “You know . . .” Mumzy’s voice hissed like a deflating air mattress. “Population Growth is going to come after you.”

Jazz took a breath and let it out. “They won’t, Mummy,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

Mumzy sniffled, swung her foot and let it come to rest again. “Did your father know?” she asked.

Jazz unbraided and refolded her fingers.

“Well,” Mumzy said. She sliced off a sliver of apple flavor, popped it in her mouth, and winced from the tartness of it. “When you get sick of the nun thing, I’ll be here. I’ll always be here. Get it?”

“Got it.” Jazz looked at Pops’s empty chair still sitting in the corner of the kitchen, the thinning plaid blanket still folded on the seat, its red squares faded into a yellowish pink against the black lines, now gray.

“Good.” Mumzy looked at the same spot.

“You know,” Jazz said, “If it makes you feel any better, I won’t be answering to Jazz either.”

7.

Trelis scrunches up his face into a grimace of goofy skepticism, and I see that he is old. When he smiles, all of his skin from hairline to uniform collar gathers into creases and lines and wrinkles like a raised relief map, with a bulbous mountain of a nose in the middle. “Do you believe in God, Sister Cunigunde?” he asks.

“Sure I do.” I can’t help but mirror his smile. “Maybe not in the sense He’ll make the world smell like jasmine, but, you know . . . Smells better than piss sometimes. Why? Don’t I look pious?”

He studies me through squinty eyes. “I’ve never seen a nun appreciate a smutty drawing before.”

“It was an inspired drawing, though,” I point out. He chokes on a laugh, snorting and shaking his head, and I shake mine too: “What’s your problem, Trelis? What do you believe?”

He says, “I’ve never cared much about that sort of thing. For me, it had to be a uniform; I couldn’t fend for myself out there, so I get it. But I couldn’t stomach the idea of taking on some weird name. My name’s Noah Trelis, right? Always was, always will be. My father gave it to me. It means something.” He lowers his eyes and touches the hem of my scapular with a shy, reverent finger. “Like, your religious name, did Mother Superior give it to you? Do you even like it?”

“I do, actually.” His finger is tracing a hieroglyph on my shin, a miniature version of the mystery we’ve created in the puddle with our bare feet. He is Noah Trelis. I am Cunigunde. “I hated my old name,” I say. “And Saint Cunigunde is a patron of small finds. I like that. My pops had ALS—I was still a child—and we lost the healthcare lottery twice in a row, so when we took him to the free clinic, Mumzy prayed to St. Cunigunde that we’d get a subsidy.”

“And?”

“And whenever she prayed to her, we did. Or maybe that’s what she told me, anyway. My mumzy lied a lot.”

An old soldier rests his hand on the knee of a godless nun over two layers of holy orders. It feels homey and safe and eternal.

“You know,” I say, “the nuns told me Cunigunde used to be a patron saint of parking spaces.”

“What’s that?” he asks.

“I have no idea. Must’ve been a subsidy for going to the park. In the Old World.” He snorts again. I think it’s a manner of his.

“What are you doing in a habit?” he says. “Shouldn’t you be chasing guys and new tech, and shaking booty to mercurythm?”

There are times when I want to talk about it. How I used to whisper random questions to the imagining inside me that would be my child, then listen for the answers, as though some shared neural net would deliver me a flash of consciousness. Back when I thought I’d be pregnant for a lifetime and then a mother for eternity, I used to sit yogi style in my bed and stroke my belly, so the creature inside it would know it was loved, and I would mouth to it the words that had been too adult until then: “holistic education,” “prenatal microbiome immunization,” “population balance restoration.” Not often, now and then, I want to talk about that one week, those seven days, the ten thousand and twenty-three minutes I knew I’d been made by God specially to be a mother. But even when I want to, I don’t. Don’t know how. There is a constant, futile, anxious rumbling in my mind, a crowded wrongness of one-sidedness after a conversation’s been abruptly ended, an interlocutor torn away, and it seems as if the wrongness might be healed by another conversation, real this time, about things that are true. About things that don’t dissolve into oblivion just because they dissolve into the past. But I don’t know how. I never have.

Mine is a pretty typical story—at least every third girl ends up in a tub just like mine. Who can say why some go back to chasing guys and mercurythm and others end up scraping the walls that separate museum cities from the ocean that’s poised to swallow the last of our memories? Why do they get over it— and I can’t? Maybe I should’ve told someone back then, someone better than boyfriend number three.

“I like the nuns,” I say. “They don’t ask stupid questions.”

It is beginning to grow dark here, at the bottom of the bowl. The sun is throwing long evening rays over the roofs and over our heads, making it darker where we sit. I rise and walk barefoot across the drying pavement, find a blinding speck in a gap between two skyscrapers, force my eyes open at it, and stare and stare until the tears flow, then turn. There’s nothing; only ghostly geometric shapes are floating inside my eyes. Trelis is a black outline on a black canvas.

“No more questions, then.” He comes close and presses his lips onto mine. They are rough and strong, and he smells like sweat and water and pre-tech metal lubricant and last night’s cannabis. We kiss in the out-of-time, not worrying about intrusion.

“Are they gonna boot you out for this?” he asks. I shrug. I want to say no. Or—perhaps—yes.

---

River Adams (they/them) lives in Massachusetts, writing and taking care of their noisy family. They hold postgraduate degrees in religious studies and creative writing, and their short prose appears in The Common, BOMB, Post Road, and other publications. They are the author of There Must Be YOU (Resource Publications, 2014), a biography of Leonard Swidler. Their debut novel, The Light of Seven Days, is forthcoming from Delphinium Books / HarperCollins.