Mother and Child Read online

  What does he have to do with her? the mother wonders. And who are these people, weeping at the periphery?

  She is a little lost among the intense traffic of souls, though it is true that she is not so lonely as usual. The souls create their own night with the quality of their dark light. Each night the mother dreams of the man put back into his flat photographic drawer in his mausoleum on William Street. At these times she feels not quite alive and not quite dead. When the mother tells the child the story of the man made of vapor and the pull of the drawer, the child protests and says that she does not like to think of the mother like that, though she suspects she is in part responsible for this twilight state the mother inhabits. The mother smiles and reassures her that nothing could be further from the truth.

  The mother is in flames. Calmly she turns to the man in his vault and he soothes her. She opens the flat tray he is put away in every night. In his drawer, in the deep freeze, the mother cools down and is at peace. You’ve got to admit it’s lovely in the subzero numbers here on the darkest street in the world, she says, on the most narrow of streets in the world, did she mention that before? Dwarfed by enormous skyscrapers, pillars of black glass, domes—who has seen such darkness? A figure blindfolded holds a scale. There’s a large bull in the square. Men and women in their daylight suits, even at night, carrying torches. All moving in vain toward the atrium.

  All those who toiled in those Towers are vaporous in the flat drawers now. A drawer opens, and she slips in smooth and quiet and flat. The night a porous, perforated surface.

  SNOW FALLS AND the roots call to the mother and the sleeping small-clawed animals in their burrows and tunnels and the winter vegetables that lie peacefully untouched under the earth. When she walks on the earth’s crust, she grows drowsy now feeling their sleep. Magnified, so many sleeping creatures multiplied, she can barely lift a foot now. What is wrong? the child says, and lies on the ground on her back, and helps the mother lift her feet one boot at a time.

  The child has read that beneath the city of Paris there is another city. There you can find a home for abandoned children. I should like to see where the animals sleep in winter, says the child, watching her mother’s eyes slowly begin to close.

  THE VIRGIN INVITES the child, lambless, into the sheepfold. The child tells her of the drink the mother made called Lamb’s Wool.

  A sheepfold holds the sheep who are light and in high winds can blow around or even be taken away by a strong enough gust. Also the sheepfold prevents the sheep from unwittingly walking into the river. When Lamby comes back, she will be sure he is put in a place like this.

  The child, who is not that light anymore, wanders the sheepfold and waits. Come to me, the Virgin says. The Virgin wraps the child in a blanket of fleece and pets her hair until she is asleep.

  22

  the mothering place

  THERE WAS ANOTHER mother with another child not far from here, except the child had grown up and gone away as children naturally do. This got the mother to thinking how many times, in this very spot, the mother-and-child scenario had replicated itself through time. She thought of the reproduction of motherhood and the reproduction of childhood, and she found herself caught in the reverberating world—the world of multiplications and resonances and profiles.

  Children a long time after they have left are known to return to the Mothering Place, and when they arrive, some remnant of childhood is always still there, waiting for them. Sometimes there is still an alive mother and sometimes there is not.

  One child, now a grown man, has just returned from the war. Nevertheless, he limps home to the place of his birth, and his mother is there still waiting. In the forest, she points to a stain on the forest floor. When the neighbors kill a deer, they always call and tell her where they did the field dressing, and she goes in the middle of the night and grabs the heart. The mother is not entirely sure whether her son is living or dead—or somewhere in transit, like the steaming body of the deer.

  The next time your life feels bereft of meaning, go to the Mothering Place if you can, and greet that mother, and she will open her cupped hands and show you the heart.

  AT THE EDGE of the Mothering Place the gamelan can be heard—it’s the Boy in the Glen and his friends come to play their song. Xylophones, drums, gongs, a bamboo flute, and strings being plucked.

  THE TROOPS, YOUNG already, grow younger and younger until they are small boys preparing for the first day of school, but while their bodies have shrunk and they have grown backwards into childhood, their uniforms are still regulation size and their helmets are enormous, obscuring their view (maybe it is better that way) but also decapitating them. The boys lift the helmets up and laugh.

  THE MOTHER TOLD Uncle Ingmar after the child was asleep, that although it was obvious, she could not get her mind around the idea that the boy in the coffin would not be growing anymore. She had glimpsed him in her sleep and had immediately begun to problem solve, as all good nurses will. She thought the coffin might need an extra hinge as an accommodation just in case, like when the guests suddenly appear at the door out of nowhere and you quickly put a leaf in the dining room table. There was no telling what might happen under the earth. She would hate to imagine. The ancients understood this. She thought it peculiar that the growth plates would stop just like that. With an adult, who had finished his growing, it would be different.

  THE SOLDIERS SWOON on the fever field and they call into the future for their betrothed and for their progeny and they weep. The soldiers swoon and call for their mothers. They are between souls—neither children nor men—and in the in-between state they perish.

  NOW IT WAS clear. She realized that what she had once thought was a coyote staring at her in the driveway was actually the Egyptian god Anubis, the Jackal, escort to the Afterlife, the god who protected the dead on their path to the Underworld. Even in profile there it was staring back at her now from inside the child’s history book. When she at last looked up, she saw four coyote-ushers there to greet her.

  CECIL PETER THE one-armed handyman skittered down the icy path carrying a dead rat by the tail. Maggots feasting on a cadaver sound like Rice Crispies popping, Cecil Peter said rather cheerfully in passing. The mother never knew what Peter Cecil might say next. It was frightening knowing that someone the mother needed as much as she needed Cecil Peter was also someone who was going to invariably terrify her again and again in ways she could not even begin to imagine. She bows her head and waits.

  THE NEXT TIME a bat entered the house she would be better prepared, she reasoned. She imagined catching the bat in a bag and saying calmly and with a certain authority, yes the bat is in a bag on the porch. She knew the bat, in a bag or not, would always function as a catalyst. Something always shifted after a bat. She hoped next time, if there must be a next time, she would better understand what its appearance signified, so as better to be able to capitalize on the change its appearance foretold.

  If the bat returned in winter she would know to bury it in snow. This would ensure its brain, frozen, would be properly encased and preserved for testing.

  She would capture it and put it in a hat or a bag, and bury it in the snow and uncover it, when the time came, with her foot. She would paw the snow like a reindeer or a horse. She would not be afraid.

  She would never allow herself to be that afraid again.

  FLITTERMOUSE. FLITTERMOUSE, WHAT are you doing in the child’s house? The shadow bat swooped. The mother was dreaming. She got up and looked out onto the white world and then fell back into sleep. The bats were hibernating, but the shadows multiplied.

  UNCLE INGMAR, UNCLE Ingmar what are you doing in the child’s house in the deepest of wee hours?

  Shh, he whispers, I’m here to steal the mother’s clock.

  IN THE QUIET and distance of winter, while the snow still blanketed the earth, the mother had agreed to join the local farm cooperative, where for a fee each week, beginning in the spring, there would be a delivery of the Va
lley’s bounty. What could be better than that? the mother wondered. All that nature afforded, available to them.

  And she sank back into the calm and white of winter, but when she fell asleep, the Spring was there to meet her:

  The Valley is indeed teeming with vegetation. Every week more and more fruits and vegetables arrive, the Valley’s pride. Every day the mother dutifully cooks the bounty, but impossibly, the more she cooks, the more vegetables appear. How can she ever keep up with the growing world, wild and alive? she wonders. Now the mother walks on the spongy vegetable floor. Now the walls are lined with rotting cabbage heads, and the child refers to them as skulls. She ponders her problem for a while, and then in the terrible hollow of the room, she begins to weep. Who can keep up? Not she. She welcomes in the white worm, the green worm, the maggots.

  I hope there will be a solution soon, the child whispers to her, before more white worms and more green worms and beetles or much worse comes. And the mother nods and sits all day in the center of the house and forces herself to eat, spooning in mouthful after mouthful of the blackening vegetables. Every variety of bug and slug call to the mother now, and she looks around and smiles because at least the child has gotten free. At least the child has escaped for another day.

  The child recognized in the mother the charm of withdrawal this terrible nest presented, the dark lull of the vegetable world, mute but breathing in the room. It was dark and quiet and a little mossy in there. How easy it would be to bolt the door and sink into a stupor, into the stench and the heat and the strange echo made by the sponge-blackened decay.

  Muffled, swaddled by layers of vegetative matter, the child feared the mother might find her permanent rest there, and she feared the empty cave of her mother’s voice in such a room, and the way of all flesh and the specter of decay, which so overwhelmed the space. When the child entered the decay of the room, she entered as a child, but when she left, she felt she was not a child any longer.

  And even though when the mother woke herself it was still winter, and the world was white and not a single vegetable had yet arrived, she shuddered. She walked to the child’s room and smoothed her hair and pushed a few tendrils away from her face. That night, sitting there on the child’s bed, she vowed come spring that she would do whatever it took to keep the child safe.

  When the child wakes it is still winter, but the mother is outside constructing a vegetable stand next to the Concrete Rabbit. At this stand, the mother explains, they will give all of nature’s bounty to the poor. Before one vegetable or fruit darkens their door, it shall be given away, and God will look with favor on their offering.

  Blessed are the poor, for they are among God’s most beloved creations. Giving under any circumstances is joyful; feeding the multitudes under any circumstances is a pleasure. Blessed indeed are the hungry; they shall be fed.

  At season’s end if there was anything left over, the mother, who could not bear the idea of waste, would allow the remaining vegetables into the house where she will store them in screw-top jars. When a person was mummified, their internal organs were placed in canopic jars and guarded by gods. The stomach was put in a jackal jar. The lungs in a baboon jar, and in a falcon jar, the intestines.

  Perhaps the outcome, as foretold in a dream, would have been different had she known that certain fruits and vegetables emit an odorless, colorless gas that speeds up the ripening process and leads everything to premature decay. Perhaps, if she had known she should not put the spinach so close to the apples, or the tomatoes so near the cauliflower, things would have turned out differently.

  No matter; the mother’s solution in the end worked perfectly: the hungry were fed and the mother was spared her madness, and the child, her burden of sorrow—a while longer.

  23

  FOR A WEEK, nothing had been heard back from the elders who had gone on the spaceship to Mars. They had all won the honor in a lottery. The mission was to be fueled only by solar power, but with winter and the distance they would be travelling away from the sun, they understood that they would inevitably succumb.

  It’s snowing here, they had recently reported, and they watched the robotic arm unfurl to collect a sample of ice. They had all sent their video farewells because, as they said, their battery packs were getting low. With the verdict clear and so soon upon them, the mother imagined their voices might be filled with flickering and uncertainty and static, but in fact they came in loud and clear with their last thoughts and impressions and reminiscences.

  . . . beautiful like nothing else . . .

  . . . I remember the drowned boy . . .

  . . . the three-legged race . . .

  . . . the Game of Graces . . .

  . . . the Spiegelpalais . . .

  . . . not to be believed . . .

  . . . Marco Polo . . .

  . . . the retina . . .

  Still, in the end, it was a quiet exit: the spacecraft put itself into low-energy safe mode. Daily, it revived itself for a few moments, but the solar panels could only generate enough power for the sojourners to fall into a lovely snippet pattern, fragments like burning and rabbit were heard, and then nothing more.

  Soon, when the sunlight disappeared entirely, temperatures fell to–300 degrees, and carbon monoxide gas encased them. One final fully articulated and beautiful sentence was heard:

  There is something . . . exhilarating about . . . the inevitable, the eloquent last man said, and the call . . . to interminable sleep . . . and the snow.

  WHEN THE CHILD opens the door on the dark winter night, the house is lit from within, and she looks at the clock, and she nods her head.

  Come in, she whispers, we’ve been waiting for you. What big teeth you have!

  THEY WERE WALKING by the water when a jet plane materialized before them. It descended serenely and landed on the glinting silver river only yards away from where they stood. Though often when the mother saw an airplane she would flinch, this time she was not frightened at all. More than anything it resembled an enormous gray goose with silvery wings floating in the hypnotic blue-gray river.

  There is a plane in the river, the mother said to the child, and the child, mesmerized, nodded her head and said, maybe Lamby is in there. Before long, a hatch opened, and one hundred or more small people stepped carefully out onto the wings. The mother and child took from their pockets their small inflatable boats and blew them up, with help from a few passersby. They paddled out to the little passengers, who had begun to shiver, as it was still winter.

  SHE LOVES THE snowy, sealed-up world. The way they’ll never make it to the cash machine or the dance lesson. The remote world. The way the American President in black evening coat can appear from around any corner, with his melancholy musings about whether God will preserve or destroy the Union. Profound darkness inhabits him. She has seen him before on one bent knee at the Mothering Place. He tips his top hat now and bows to the mother and child in the white world, as they pass.

  THE MOTHER STRUGGLED to wake herself but she could not. That night from the 101st floor, she fell. When the resurrection men came, she was waiting. She had forgotten about the resurrection men by then, and they frightened her . . .

  THE TIME OF the mysterious dyings had come. Bellwether creatures were falling from the sky. First it was the frogs, widespread over the continent of Africa, then it was the bees, and now it was being reported that there was, overnight, a sudden precipitous decline in the bat population. As many as had come once, in a torrent from the tree suddenly, quickly now were dying, and with their dying, a terrible foreboding settled in. The mother had grown accustomed to their presence. Not a day had passed when she had not thought of them, sensed them near. She’d drawn them close in her mind, the objects of her deepest dread and attachment, summoning them to her and gathering them in.

  Bats perish, and no one knows why, the announcement read.

  I’ll be your nursling for the end, she whispered. They should have been hibernating in the caverns on the other side
of the river. Now she knew that every bat she saw, flying in the winter in the daylight, was a dead bat flying. The obscure objects of her fear, now covered in a white fungus, were flailing in the snow. They were falling, failing in the Bat Hibernaculum. So read the reports from the Vortex Man.

  She could not help but notice now that the bats, broken against the snow, exactly looked like her black umbrella—the one she used to protect the child and herself from the summoning God and all the other beckoning forces, bats included, and she wondered why it had taken her until now to see the thing. She considered that perhaps the bat that had come to them, chittering in Pentecostal fervor from the felled tree, had been in fact an angel: something to fear, yes, inspiring great terror, yes; but something also shot through with essential goodness. It had come to help her, to escort her, presaging change, offering the way.

  One hundred million years ago, flowers appeared on the earth. Once the air was so loaded with bees it seemed to shimmer. And apple trees. An apple has ten ovules, each of which can produce a seed. In order to produce a seed, at least six ovules must be pollinated. And with that, the apple falls asleep.

  She closes her eyes and dreams. The world without us will be a world gone finally back to bees and bats again.

  WHEN A SWARM of bees suddenly quits the hive, the Toothless Wonder says, it is a sign that death is hovering near the house. Ask anyone, he says.

  And the bats, the mother asks?

  THE COLLAPSIBLE MOTHER and the child moved through the Collapsible World, and it comforted them to know that other people, not only they, were at the mercy of the great and terrible collapsing things. It heartened them to know they were not alone.

  No one seemingly gave the concept of the Collapsible Mother a serious thought. No one could fathom the notion of a mother who collapsed the way other things collapsed. The notion was just not conceivable. A Collapsible Mother was not a mother who collapsed like many other things in the Collapsible World, but a mother who was flexible: folding and unfolding, accommodating and changing—that is what mothers did after all—like a paper fan, only sturdy, or a space probe, only warm. Mother: a soft-bodied insect, flexible, with a superhuman curiosity that is intelligence, intuition, passion, and charm, and graced with the gifts of critical thinking, deductive reasoning—both practical and grounded—and clairvoyance, immortal and dwelling always in approachable light. This meant you could approach the Collapsible Mother with any quandary and she would come up with a solution to the problem, be it large or small.