He stands up suddenly, pushing his chair back, and paces, fern leaves brushing his clothes. She knows she’s gotten to him. He seems like he’s about to storm out, but instead takes a deep breath and turns back to her.
“I know what you’re going through,” he says. “I was brainwashed by my family to actually want to be unwound—and not just by my family, but by my friends, my church, everyone I looked up to. The only voice who spoke sense was my brother Marcus, but I was too blind to hear him until the day I got kidnapped.”
“You mean see,” she says, putting a nice speed bump in his way.
“Huh?”
“Too blind to see him, too deaf to hear him. Get your senses straight. Or maybe you can’t, because you’re senseless.”
He smiles. “You’re good.”
“And anyway, I don’t need to hear your life story. I already know it. You got caught in a freeway pileup, and the Akron AWOL used you as a human shield—very noble. Then he turned you, like cheese gone bad.”
“He didn’t turn me. It was getting away from my tithing, and seeing unwinding for what it is. That’s what turned me.”
“Because being a murderer is better than being a tithe, isn’t that right, clapper?”
He sits back down again, calmer, and it frustrates her that he is becoming immune to her snipes.
“When you live a life without questions, you’re unprepared for the questions when they come,” he says. “You get angry and you totally lack the skills to deal with the anger. So yes, I became a clapper, but only because I was too innocent to know how guilty I was becoming.”
There is an intensity about him now, and a moistness to his eyes. Miracolina can tell that he is sincere, and that this is not just a show for her. Maybe he’s even saying more than he meant to say. She begins to wonder if she has misjudged him, and then gets angry at herself for wondering such a thing.
“You think I’m like you, but I’m not,” Miracolina says. “I’m not part of a religious order that tithes. My parents did it in spite of our beliefs, not because of it.”
“But you were still raised to believe it was your purpose, weren’t you?”
“My purpose was to save my brother’s life by being a marrow donor, so my purpose was served before I was six months old.”
“And doesn’t that make you angry that the only reason you’re here was to help someone else?”
“Not at all,” she says a little too quickly. She purses her lips and leans back in her chair, squirming a bit. The chair feels a little too hard beneath her. “All right, so maybe I do feel angry once in a while, but I understand why they did it. If I were them, I would have done the same thing.”
“Agreed,” he says. “But once your purpose was served, shouldn’t your life be your own?”
“Miracles are the property of God,” she answers.
“No,” he says, “miracles are gifts from God. To call them his property insults the spirit in which they are given.”
She opens her mouth to reply but finds she has no response, because he’s right. Damn him for being right—nothing about him should be right!
“We’ll talk again when you’re over yourself,” he says, and signals a waiting guard to take her away.
• • •
The next day a class is added into her schedule, to keep her from having too idle a mind. It’s called Creative Projection. It takes place in a classroom that was once some kind of parlor, with faded, moth-eaten portraits on peeling walls. Miracolina wonders if the stodgy faces in the paintings look down on the lessons here with approval, disapproval, or absolute indifference.
“I want you to write a story,” says the teacher, a man with annoying little round glasses. Glasses! Objects of antiquity no longer needed by anyone, what with laser procedures and affordable eye-replacement surgery. There is a certain arrogance to their quaintness. As if people who choose to wear glasses feel they are somehow superior.
“I want you to write the story of you—your biography. Not the life you’ve lived but the life you’re going to live. This is the biography you might write forty, fifty years from now.” The teacher wanders the room, gesticulating into the air, probably imagining himself to be Plato or someone equally lofty. “Project yourselves forward. Tell me who you think you’ll be. I know that’ll be hard for all of you. You’ve never dared think of the future—but now you can. I want you to enjoy this. Be as wild as you want. Have fun with it!”
Then he sits down and leans back in his chair with his hands behind his head, very satisfied with himself.
Miracolina taps her pen impatiently on the page while the other kids write. He wants her dream future? Fine. She’ll give these people something honest, even if it isn’t what they want to hear.
It is years from now, she writes, and my hands belong to a mother who lost her hands in a fire. She has four children. She comforts them, bathes them, brushes their hair, and changes their diapers with those hands. She treasures my hands because she knows how precious they are. She gets manicures weekly for me, even though she doesn’t know who I was.
My legs belong to a girl who was in a plane crash. She had been a track star, but found that my legs simply weren’t built for that. For a while she mourned the loss of her Olympic dream, but then realized that my legs could dance. She learned to tango, and one day she met a prince while dancing in Monaco, and she danced her way into his heart. They married, and now the royal couple have a grand ball every year. The highlight of the ball is her stunning tango with her prince.
With every word she writes, Miracolina is filled with deeper fury at all the possibilities stolen from her.
My heart went to a scientist on the verge of discovering a way to harness starlight and solve the world’s energy needs. He was so close—but then suffered a major heart attack. Thanks to me, though, he survived and completed his life’s work, making the world a better place for all of us. He even won the Nobel Prize.
Is it so strange to want to give of yourself totally and completely? If that is what’s in Miracolina’s heart, why should it be denied her?
And as for my mind—my memories, which are full of a loving childhood—they all went to troubled souls who had no such memories of their own. But now with that part of me in them, they are healed of the many hurts in their lives.
Miracolina turns in her paper, and the teacher, perhaps more curious about hers than anyone else’s, reads it while the other kids are still writing. She watches his face, full of thoughtful expressions as he reads. She doesn’t know why she should care, but she’s always cared what her teachers think. Even the ones she didn’t like. Then, when he’s done, he comes over to her.
“Very interesting, Miracolina, but you’ve left out one thing.”
“What?”
“Your soul,” he says. “Who gets your soul?”
“My soul,” she tells him with confidence, “goes to God.”
“Hmm . . .” He strokes some graying whisker stubble. “So it goes to God, even if every part of your body is still alive?”
Miracolina stands firm against his questioning. “I have a right to believe that, if I want to.”
“True, true. One problem with that, though. You’re Catholic, isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”
“And you want to be unwound voluntarily.”
“So?”
“Well . . . if your soul leaves this world, then voluntary unwinding is no different from assisted suicide—and in the Catholic religion, suicide is a mortal sin. Which means that by your own beliefs, you’d be going to hell.”
Then he leaves her to stew with an A-minus on her essay. Minus, she assumes, due to the eternal damnation of her soul.