They stood up blinking in the light as Dr. Stoll told Mim, “You’d better come with me.”
“No,” said Mim. “You can’t take me. I’m not part of your outfit. I haven’t signed anything for you and you’ve never copied my ID card and if you shoot me it’s murder in the first degree. You can have some of your people there come over and haul Mary away, but she’ll never talk to you or do your bidding and you’ll never know why. You can take her apart or melt her down, I guess, but it would be a sorry waste. As one architect to another.”
He stared at her a moment longer. Then he smiled. “Well. There we are.”
“Looks that way to me,” said Mim.
He cleared his throat. “Judy,” he said, “come up here and take a seat. I want you to announce to these good people that they can go home.”
He climbed sideways from his chair into the van, seating himself beside the girl with the boil on the side of her nose, who immediately started talking, but he shushed her and peered out the window to see what was happening. The “Judy” he’d been talking to, I saw, was the girl with the shaved head and the sling. She tried to climb up into the chair, but she kept on slipping, and finally the boy with the metal teeth came over and helped her. She sat in the chair and picked up the metal cone, but she didn’t say anything.
“Tell them to go home,” called the doctor from inside the van. “Tell them it’s over now.”
The girl said something into the cone. It was loud, but you couldn’t make out what it was. It was like “Umpf, eempf.” Like her mouth was stuck together. Me and Kat were gazing at each other in bewilderment when somebody behind us cried out, “Judy!”
Jonathan came hobbling across the field. “Judy!” he shouted.
“Jonathan, no!” said Mim. To the men standing around her she said desperately, “Stop him, catch him!” But nobody was going to go after the tall, lurching foreigner with the knapsack who’d hurtled out from among our very homes. As he passed Mim, she tried to grab him, and Dr. Stoll called from the van, “Now, now, my dear! Jonathan is under my jurisdiction. He is registered as my intern. I do possess copies of his identification papers. You will have to let him go.”
Jonathan turned to Mim. “Sorry,” he said.
She was just tall enough to come up to his ribs. He could have leaned on her as a man leans on a rake.
“You idiot,” she said.
“It’s Judy,” he stammered. “Something’s—he’s—I have to help her.”
“You’re gonna tell him everything, aren’t you?” Mim said dully.
“I’ll try not to.”
He limped toward the vans. Two gunmen came to guard him on either side. The boy with metal teeth helped Judy down from the chair. They all got into the vans and turned off their flashing lights and drove away. They didn’t let Jonathan sit with Judy. They put him in a different car.
We cross the sea of glass and disembark on the other side. Here is the city. “Which city?” you ask, and I tell you, “It is the Object City.” The Object City is broad and high. Its wall is an hundred and forty and four cubits, according to the measure of the angels. The wall has twelve foundations. The first foundation is jasper, the second sapphire, the third a chalcedony, the fourth an emerald. I can feel you receding. You ask me very slowly, “Why are the edges moving?” and then, with an effort, “Why is it so tangled?” The fifth sardonyx; the sixth sardius, the seventh chrysolite. The Object City looks like a cloud of black-and-white specks. It looks like an opera cloak. It looks like a flock of swans in flight. It looks like stars. It looks like an horror of great darkness. The eighth beryl, the ninth a topaz, the tenth a chrysoprasus. Because you are sinking fast, I don’t tell you the true name of the Object City, which is the Object World. Instead I tell you, “This is Jericho, your own Jericho. In the night you are awakened by a wildcat’s cry.” I say, “In the morning you will find the prints of the deer that come down from the mountains. They have pawed up the snow to eat the grass in the orchard.”
Now you will have a little sleep. When you wake, we will try again to enter the city.
The eleventh a jacinth. The twelfth an amethyst.
If She Strays, She Can Come Back
(Sometimes the early summer is so happy it calls to me. I have to go out. I go outside after supper, I stay outside for hours. How thick the rhubarb grows out back and oh how sweet the beans. I lie in the flowers, drenched with their perfume, and feel the dew come down. It touches my eyelids like a cold hand. When I open my eyes the heavens are filling like a bowl with glowing summer dark. A night so blue you can feel it in your lungs. My little boys know this mood. They charge outside, play around me, wild as goats. These will be their best memories, for this is their favorite mother. She allows everything. She is flopped down in the beans. They run around, chasing fireflies. Baby Levi’s diaper sags and his brothers pull it off him, laughing, and chuck it over the fence. Levi runs half naked, shrieking for joy. I know if I sit up I’ll see Sam’s shadow at the kitchen window, pacing back and forth with increasing energy until he works up enough frustration to come out and call us in. How, he will demand, can I let the boys act like this? Don’t I know how it looks? I don’t sit up. I am struck down by the sky. I think of Sam, his long hot days of toil spent in a noble pursuit, scattering seed to make the land flourish. And what of the land? Does it feel that its work is noble? What of the horses plodding up and down beneath the glinting whip? The boys are roughhousing close to me. They kick me in the ribs. Levi treads on my breastbone. Is this a noble pursuit? Now the moon comes out from behind the clouds, filling the branches of the old crabapple tree with mellow light. “Noom!” crows Levi, pointing. “Noom!” I clutch his pretty leg. He giggles and bends to plant his fat palms on my neck. And gives me a kiss smelling of dirty milk, wobbling, losing his balance, hitting my face too hard, our foreheads knocking. Oh, you—the one I write to in the flicker of the lamp—what do you want from me, or for me? What is your desire?)
I woke up to a rattle at the window. My heart lifted. I thought, It’s Sam! But then I realized he was in the bed beside me. We were no longer courting; we were married. I went downstairs, pulled Sam’s big coat on, and opened the door, and there was Mim.
“Hello, Lyddie,” she said; and “Hi, Lyddie!” said Mary.
Mim sat in a cart. Her head was bare. Her hair hung loose and tangled as the bracken. The cart was attached to Mary, who still wore her neat black cap. Fresh, cold moonlight glimmered on her face.
“What is this contraption?” I asked, shivering.
“Well,” said Mim, “it’s a kind of carriage. Like the one you saw the other night, for Jonathan. This one’s a little bigger, though.”
I noticed several dark bundles around her, and Hochmut poking his nose over the slats.
“You’re going away, then?”
She nodded. “I came to say goodbye.”
“With no cap?” I asked, my eyes filling with tears.
“That’s my disguise.”
I laughed, blinking. “A fine disguise. You won’t get far. Not in this—half carriage, half woman. You’ll stick out like a rash.”
“I don’t have to get far. Just to the Profane Industries.”
“Jonathan?” I whispered.
“I can’t leave him, can I? I intend to spring him before he spills my secrets. I might take that bald-headed girl too. His friend, Judy. She looked like she could use a change of occupation.”
I shook my head. “Mim.” Then, as I noticed one of her bundles looking at me with a pair of large, scared eyes, I gasped: “Mim! Is that your mother?”