Mother and Child Page 11

  IN TRYING TO think about where Lamby went, an exhaustive application of logic to all available possibilities should be employed. One must follow every thread. Trace every step, inch by inch, point by point; blindly exhaust the search space completely. Such a process is known as Ariadne’s Thread. It permits backtracking, reversing early decisions, and trying alternatives. Yes, the mother thinks, all quite sensible, but we have little interest in the truth if the truth will lead us in a disheartening direction—all we want is Lamby back.

  THE MOTHER AND child walk through the sacrificial world. There appeared a mark of rabbit blood at the door. The mother places her hand over the mark, and the blood shines through. A great price will be exacted and a small reward will be doled out in return. Who looks down on them? the mother wonders. They step over the threshold of blood where the cat’s catch of the day lies splayed and faceless.

  Some cultures believe that stepping over a threshold of blood brings lifelong luck; others believe the luck is in a swarm of bees or in a vanishing lamb.

  16

  torch

  THE MOTHER HAD been under an inordinate amount of stress, and it made the Leprosy appear. Actually it was not Leprosy, it was something called Shackles, but it covered her face and head and she looked like a Leper, as the Risen-Again Children duly noted, and her suffering was extreme. The doctor said she might go blind, or she might go deaf from the Leprosy that had come from too much stress. After the pain subsided somewhat, the mother began to resume her life, and she could hear, and she was not blind. And though she still had a bloated, swollen monster head, there was the matter of back-to-school shopping to do.

  The mother and the child went to the shoe section of the large department store and sat in the children’s section and waited for someone to help them. When the stack of boxes tall as a skyscraper came toppling down, the mother started to cry. Probably the mother was just tired. She put her terrible head in her hands, and when she looked up, there was a small coven of children pointing at her, gasping and then running away.

  As news spread throughout the first floor of the department store, more and more children came to do their gawking. It was always the same: her head in her hands, then her head up. When her head went up and she looked right at them, they would run away, screaming with glee. Head down, head up, gasp and run away, gasp and run away.

  The child, however, did not notice. She was oblivious to the commotion and remained deep within her shoe trance.

  The child, as any child psychologist will tell you, cannot, no matter what, afford to see her mother as a monster. The disintegration of the core narrative is at stake, the psychologists might say. The mother smiles from inside her crusty head and helps the child with every buckle and every lace, buckle after buckle, lace after lace, shoe after shoe.

  The child saw only that her mother was tying the laces of the most wonderful sneakers in the world, and that they lit up and had princesses on them, and that her mother was beautiful.

  THE DEAD BIRDS, still warm, have been arranged from warm to warmest on the path by Bunny Boy. The mother is getting fed up. Isn’t there a primeval forest, isn’t there a deep unconscious better suited for this sort of thing? Why this path, the path she must walk day in and day out, to the mailbox, to the car, to the world at large, littered with the newly dead, still warm? Along with the birds, the path has become more and more crowded with the things she dreads; but it is okay, she tells herself, it is just something else to bear.

  On the path now, a jar. On the path a glove, a stethoscope, a briefcase, a silver basin, a pair of gleaming scissors, a doll’s head, a torch.

  There is a wilderness deep inside her, a place she now no longer allows herself to go. It might frighten the child and the child might then disappear. More than anything, she knows she must stay close to the path.

  If the wilderness wants to come, it must meet her more than halfway; it must come to this path now, from which she will not veer.

  EACH DAY NOW, the schoolgirls appear on the path with backpacks and sharpened pencils. All they want is to resume their studies. All they want is to go to school again. The mother motions to them to come, and she hands them a book and tells them to take a seat.

  THAT NIGHT THE mother sees in the distance a flame and she tries to walk to it, but no matter how far she goes, she never arrives. The mother becomes tired and decides to sit in the meadow and watch the flame from afar, as it is her job, she knows, to keep track of the paths of fire whenever possible.

  IN THE ANCIENT world, a torch has been lit on a mountaintop, and soon it will be traveling across the world to the Olympic Games, and the announcement is made that the entire sojourn will be projected on a screen at the Spiegelpalais.

  The Mother Flame, origin of fire, shall accompany the Torch on all its travels. The Mother Flame cannot be extinguished. She is stored in an official lantern and is always there. Yes, the mother thinks, she is just like any mother.

  Keeping the Torch lit will be the responsibility of ten flame attendants who attend to the fire twenty-four hours a day. The mother and child will sit in the front row of the great theater transfixed. The Torch will ride on a camel and on the Concorde and in a North American canoe. The child will keep close track of its itinerary. The newspaper fears for the Torch and its mother because GinGin, the place that is the Torch’s destination, is controversial on more fronts than one.

  THE MOTHER AND child bring their trundle beds to the Spiegelpalais as they do not want to miss even a second of the flame’s transit. Most times it is only the mother and the child who are there holding vigil, and they wonder where everyone else is. A place of fire is being prepared for them, the mother surmises—what other explanation could there be?

  THE FLAME SITS in its specially designed charter plane, glimmering in the corner. Security is high. The mother and child eat popcorn and stare at the enormous screen, riveted. The Torch and its group of round-the-clock guardians often take up residence in the most chic hotels. They all go to the hotel bar. The bar patrons sense something glowing in their midst, but they know not what.

  At night the Torch sleeps in a lantern along with its mother, who sleeps beside it. It stays in a single room each night with three watchmen, one of whom must be awake at all times. At night there are the wonders of the world and constellations, falling stars, and from their trundle bed they observe the heavens through the Spiegelpalais’ skylight.

  At Gethsemane, despite the assurances that they would stay awake with Jesus in his darkest hour of need, the apostles fell asleep. When it comes to the Torch, a world of sleeping potions and conspiracies and dastardly acts orchestrated from somewhere else does not sound so far-fetched.

  THE FLAME COMMEMORATES the theft of fire from Zeus by Prometheus. Look, the mother cries, it’s Paris! If there is a place in the world the mother would like to see before she dies, it is Paris. In Paris, black banners are hung on Notre Dame and the Tour Eiffel to greet the Torch. French protesters attempt to steal the flame, and the flame is extinguished five times. But you cannot kill fire, try as you might. The resurrected flame cowers, and eventually the Torch is driven by bus to the stadium.

  WHEN THE FLAME arrives in the City of Saint Francis, accompanied by dignitaries and protected by riot-ready security, a round of photos is taken and then the flame retires.

  THE VORTEX MAN appears from inside the whirling world. Hold on to your hats! he cackles. The Torch, fed by the Vortex, blows furiously in its cup.

  THE CHILD IS mesmerized. Protesters announce their desire to kidnap the Torch, to take the flame hostage—every mother’s nightmare. The Mother Flame fears that if the Torch is captured by protesters, there is always the possibility that the Sympathy Syndrome will set in, and if this occurs, she may never see her little flame again.

  It is called the Sympathy Syndrome when a captive begins to sympathize with its captors and begins to do uncharacteristic things of all sorts because of its deep affection for its newly bonded attendant.

>   The child wonders if the flame is captured and begins to sympathize with its captors, and if it heads up the liberation of TingTing, GinGin’s enemy, and breaks from its box, whether the earth will be consumed in fire. The child thinks she should number her worries, but before long, the child is asleep and the mother is left to track the flame.

  The next day, the mother, whose tears are flammable, looks at her dry-eyed and tells her it is not for her to worry about.

  THE CHILD IS packing her backpack for the day. It is too heavy, the mother says, and she takes out all the items—the pencil box, the calculator, the complete works of Lewis Carroll, the Piglet, the wooden rosary, the lip balm, the photograph of the Eiffel Tower—and she rearranges everything and puts it back. The child finds that just because of her mother’s touch, the objects have lightened, and smiling and weightless and worry-free, she rises up, and heads off to school.

  THE TORCH WOULD like to climb Mt. Everest and cares nothing for Doomsday Predictions or the Sympathy Syndrome. In its mind, if a flame can be said to have a mind, the flame is free.

  The mother, for one, thinks all fire should be treated with respect.

  Through the skylight of the Spiegelpalais, the child sees three silent astronauts from GinGin making gestures. They’re tethered only tenuously, it seems, to GinGin anymore. They are looking for Torch, they say.

  WHEN THE TORCH appears again, it is in India, and the mother imagines it might mingle with the fires of India, a country that in her mind is always burning. She imagines the Ganges sometimes when she and the child go to their own river, and all the small pyres.

  The baby flame, enormous, licks the edges of the glass. Some days there is nothing more the mother would like than to be stored in a jar by the door, there for the child to feed from, if the situation becomes dire.

  ONE OF THE school girls had a squished eye and had to have a series of eye operations to unsquish it. Back in GinGin where she was a baby, she lay in a bed, in a row of beds, in a room of beds filled with girls that they must have forgotten to touch or turn over. And because no one had remembered to touch or turn them over, their eyes had squished into the beds.

  The GinGin astronauts were going to a new planet. Don’t forget to hold the girls when you get there, the child called after them. Don’t forget to turn the GinGin girls in their beds! Otherwise they will have squished eyes, and it is not so easy to unsquish them. She felt the air above her dense with stars and birdsong, and above that the lonely transit of planets, and the men starting over again.

  On the new planet, the astronauts call back, we have no intention of holding the girls or turning them over. Not for all the tea in GinGin are we going to touch those girls.

  THAT NIGHT, AFTER the screen went dark in the Spiegelpalais, the mother looked up to the skylight. Behold the bat, she cried! O winged wonder! The only mammal besides children able to fly. O faceted scapula. Behold the sternum, the rib cage, the robust clavicles. O Flying Fox. O Prodigy! Behold the tree chreub!

  At dawn, the artist’s cardinal, emblazoned, alighted for a moment on a mulberry branch and then flew away.

  THE RAINS CAME and many funnels swerved into them and the world was shaking, and they were afraid. Hold on to your hats! There was nothing the mother and child could do but take cover next to the giant screen in the cavernous, emptied space and wait. The screen flickered and gave no clues and then grew dark, and for a full twenty-four hours, nothing could be seen on the screen. Petitions were sent to the Vortex Man, and they must eventually have been heard, for at the Fortieth Hour, the screen at the Spiegelpalais at last filled with light.

  EARTHQUAKE KILLS TENS of Thousands, Many of Them School-children, the screen reads. GinGin Grieves, Suspends Torch Relay.

  The mother bows her head as if bludgeoned. She and the child fall to their knees.

  DEAD SCHOOLCHILDREN ARE strewn across the debris. Many others are trapped. Everywhere there are fingers and feet, and mothers clawing the dirt. Crushed in the shoddily built schools. The earthquake struck at 2:30 when the children were still in class. A mother is screaming in the ruins. Her only child has vanished into the chaos, and she cannot find her. Textbooks and backpacks are everywhere.

  The children are extinguished. The mother cowers as rescue workers search for survivors on the screen, and she puts her hands over the child’s eyes. It is the rule that a couple is allowed one, and only one, child each. A stack of only children in the rubble of the schoolhouses across GinGin Province. Maybe children are alive in the rubble, the child says. Maybe the parents will dig them out with their fingers.

  Tie the mothers tightly together to calm them, an official is instructing. A distraught mother abruptly turns. She thinks she feels her child’s presence like a wind at her back.

  The mother and child stand helpless before the enormous screen. A large crane outfitted with floodlights arrives to lift massive slabs of concrete through the darkened, smoldering terrain, where the only children do not cry out any longer. Parents build makeshift shrines and place photos of their children at the death place. Some burn red candles or paper money to send their children into the Afterlife.

  The screen at the Spiegelpalais says that the Torch will be revitalized after the proper term of mourning. It is promised one day that it will appear again in the City of Forests.

  And with that the screen goes black.

  THE MOTHER AND child hobble home as best they can, but they don’t get far before the earth opens up before them. In all that darkness they stand before a vast canyon of light, and for a moment, the ancient maple flashes before the mother’s eyes. Where are we? the child asks. But the mother says nothing in return. The canyon is filled with dump trucks and cement trucks and small fire engines and police cars performing their tasks—they look like toys from this vantage point, and they mesmerize the small boys who have materialized from the outlying gloom. The mother and child stand at the top and look into it for a long time.

  What can be seen now, without the Slurry Wall, and what has been hidden for millennia underneath the great metropolis astonishes them. Look, the mother says and she takes the child’s hand, and gingerly they begin their climb down the steep ravine, hundreds of feet below the sea. They sense the dead are all around them, and they see what remains, as they pass archeologists sifting the debris. In the subterranean world, the workers hand them the remnants: a shoulder, an ankle, a few ribs. Maybe they should turn back, the mother thinks. Still, there is no question of turning back. The child points. She sees that piles are being made now: computer parts, electrical wire, carpet. Someone tries to hand her a bowl of two hundred bone fragments. Are we dead? the child asks.

  Dread fills the mother, but still she is compelled forward. For a moment she hesitates, torn as to whether to bring the child further down into the canyon or to leave her near the anthropologists at the rock ledge and retrieve her on the way back, but by the time she formulates a plan, it is too late. The mother has no choice, as the child seems to have folded herself up and attached herself to the wall of the mother’s womb. Though she cannot see the child, she knows she is there, and the child’s little heartbeat gives her the courage and the momentum she needs. She takes a few more steps. As briefcases and cell phones and jewelry and dresses are being excavated, the mother bows her head. She doesn’t know what to do. She can’t look or look away. The child peers through the ruby scrim of her mother’s body as they continue their descent. They pass, along the way, battalions of vanishing men.

  Who goes there? And the mother’s voice echoes in the space. Deep within the earth, plant material has been compressed for millions and millions of years into nuggets, and the men, who have gone to retrieve it, begin their way back up. They pass the mother and the child going in the opposite direction. Come with us, the men say, but the mother shakes her head no. They shrug and ascend, soot-covered, holding their illuminant—something from the center of the earth that glows. We could bring you back up, they offer once more, we know the way. The mothe
r thinks there is a kindness to them. But she shakes her head once more. The vanishing men hand the mother an ember and are gone.

  The mother continues her grave descent. They see extravagant rock striations from the last Ice Age and pause. The mother puts a hand to the gleaming boulders—so cold to the touch, so strange, and all memory of the Valley and the life above begins to fade. It’s beautiful here, don’t you think—irrefutable as it is, and so quiet, and so dark.

  The child urges the mother not to linger, and the mother understands, though she fears that she soon will reach the point of no return. The way is steep, and the mother’s footing is unsure. She wonders why they did not go back with the men.

  She sees swirling concentric rings now, and she realizes she is far beyond the Ice Age all of a sudden—the rocks more ancient than those marked by glaciers—and with this realization she plummets, and her ember goes out.

  At this point, she turns on the miner’s lamp she been wearing all along on her head. The lamp lights the cave nicely, and she points out to the child the minerals and the essences. Look, she whispers, look. They have gotten to the place where the rock layers run vertically now instead of horizontally.

  Five hundred million years ago, in this very place, the North American and African continental plates slammed together with unimaginable violence. This consoles the mother who knows that they are small and their lives insignificant, and that one day all the catastrophes will be erased. Astounding reds and purples and greens open up for the first time in millennia, miles below the wounded site.