Mother and Child Page 17

  Even bats, she read in the newspaper, were collapsing, and though it should not, it made her inordinately sad. The world was amiss. Agents of extraordinary misfortune might appear at any time with their inscrutable tidings, or carry any of them away at any moment against their wills. Anything at all was possible. The child thought of Lamby. And the mother thought of the 4,000 dead soldiers.

  She felt unnerved. War was everywhere and it was always wrong, that is what the mother said. All wars were equally barbarous and equally unnecessary. There was a divide, and they sat quietly and looked at it on the horizon, and you fell on one side of the divide or the other. For someone so flexible and pliant, the mother, when it came to the divide, would not give or bend. The mother then, more times than not, felt not flexible, but inflexible, not immortal, but dying.

  The Collapsible Mother stayed aligned, and upright, flexible and generous and open-minded, and the child eyeing her felt proud and she loved her. Some called it the Tragic Sublime, others the Heroics of the Everyday. You were always hearing about the heroes on TV, and the heroes on TV always said the same thing: they were not heroes; they were just like other people. Four thousand soldiers from here, and who knew how many soldiers from there, and worst of all, how many thousands of ordinary people, children included, were now dead. All the world collapsing.

  When the child was a baby, the mother would carry around one of those collapsible strollers that fit into the trunk of the black car. This came back to her now when she thought of the mystery of the multitudinous bats collapsing like little broken black umbrellas, dying in daylight when they should have been hibernating, falling and folding up on the bright white snow.

  In the bright sun, in the snow, dressed in their white coats, radiant in the blood of the missing lamb, it’s too bright to see. Covered with a fungus, the wings close up.

  SHE RECALLS HIS melancholy years in the Cold Lab through the fog. There in the deep freeze, pressed next to the abandoned embryos, the Grandfather from the North Pole once spent long hours studying the complex properties of snow. If you put a bowl of snow in the refrigerator and come back in an hour, the snow will have changed significantly. Snow, the Grandfather from the North Pole would say, is almost always in motion. And there’s nothing more beautiful than that.

  The weak layers of snow are faceted, smooth, unbonded to one another, and so more likely to give way. Had the Grandfather stayed in his Cold Lab in his thermal lab coat with his multiplying theories concerning the metamorphosis of snow, he might have lived for something like forever—such was the makeup of his gene pool—but alas, avalanches were his passion. Besides, the Cold Lab was too sad, he said. The parents say they would like their embryos frozen for an eternity. They call them like this their snowflake children, and the Grandfather, passing them—how silent—always felt glum. Such a strange and terrible orphanage I’ve wandered here, he wrote in his log, right before he walked out the door, never to return.

  In the mother’s mind, he’s always there, in the center of the glittering world. He’s so beloved—but he’s hard to see. In a small shack, he waits while his assistant sets off little two-pound explosions so that the snow buries him—notebook in hand.

  Some say the most critical thing in surviving an avalanche is to create a pocket of air in front of your face so you can breathe while you wait for rescue. I would swim though, the Grandfather wrote. I would get prone in the snow and stay on top and skim the whitest surface. Too late, a balloon system for better avalanche-surviving was devised: a ripcord that would make balloons inflate and keep you afloat, just like he said, on top of the snow.

  Imagine being bombarded by crystals! the Grandmother from the North Pole cries. When he was finally found, he was encased in glitter and wearing an amulet which held some of the world’s most ancient ice—half a million years old, it is said, and cored from a field three miles deep. What a sight! Around his neck an amulet, and in his hand a love note: the Grandfather from the North Pole, drowned in beauty—frozen, bright.

  24

  passage

  THE LITTLE POPE, very old, holds a glass dome, and under it is a very tiny green tree. The Vatican, he explains, is the only sovereign state in the world that is carbon-neutral. The ancient buildings have been outfitted with solar panels, and someone, he says, has donated enough trees in a Hungarian forest to nullify all carbons emitted from the Holy See. The Pope, who oversees the Global Church, says that he is known now as the Green Pope. It is humanity’s responsibility to care for the planet. Time is short.

  As of late, we have invented seven new sins, the Pope informs his audience. Number four is Polluting the Environment.

  A little dim energy-saving lightbulb comes on as evening arrives. I am a steward to God’s creation. I shall protect the children, both born and unborn, from exposure to environmental poisons, especially the poor. And all of those who are most vulnerable. And the cats, born and unborn. The Pope loves cats. He has had, he says, a lifelong love of cats. He often chats to them in German at length, and they follow him around, fascinated by his gibberish. The Pope is lovable in his fondness for felines. The Pope says that cats are forbidden where he lives in the Apostolic Palace, and that it has been one of the biggest adjustments of all. You can see the Pope some days walking around the carbon-neutral grounds with a small ball of twine in case a cat should happen by. He meets up with them in the garden, feeds them, bandages their wounds.

  The mother hands the Pope a notebook listing one thousand boys and girls who have been injured in the Boston archdiocese alone. An Inquisition found that the Pope before he was Pope had obstructed justice in the case of the priests who had committed the gravest of all the sins on earth. Before he was Benedict, he was Joseph, and when he was Joseph, he ordered bishops should be protected by the Pontifical Secret. The sexual abuse of children is somehow allowed to be hidden by the Pontifical Secret in something called the Obstruction. To reveal the Pontifical Secret is to risk excommunication. Until the child-victim reached eighteen years plus ten more years, the gravely sinning priests are protected by the Secret. So if you are a child of nine, for instance, the offending priest gets an extra nine years until the child reaches eighteen, plus ten more, for a total of nineteen years in all before he has to worry. By then the nine-year-old is twenty-eight. Cases such as these are of a delicate and grievous sort.

  The Pope, of course, does not have children in the way that mothers have children. The mother wonders whether under the category of Secrets there might be a Secret Neutering Process for those in the church who harm children, and for those who protect them. Neutering is not really so bad given the magnitude of the trespass. There is a Biblical logic to the reasoning. The prim Pope blushes. The mother gently takes his hand and says that this way, the problem of the privates might be resolved once and for all. Bunny Boy, she tells him, her cat, seems to have made his peace with it.

  THE POPE APPEARS again on the tarmac of Andrews Air Force Base and is met by the War Crimes President. They are accompanied by the millions of children they have put in harm’s way, both grown and ungrown, both alive and dead, and also the many who are somewhere between the two: not really dead, not really alive anymore, but in a perpetual half-state, thanks to the Supreme Power of the Men.

  Is a slow death better, or a fast one? A complete death, or a partial one?

  The children are gathered a few miles deep and many, many thousands of feet high, standing one atop another ad infinitum. From a bird’s-eye view it’s all pretty awful. The Pope and the President on the tarmac walk hand in hand. How puny they are from this vantage point. The Pope, a holy man, has shuffled known perpetrators into fresh dioceses and has put the interests of the Church above the interests of children. The President meanwhile, unprovoked, is the instigator of unimaginable violence and suffering. The red carpet is seepy and spongy with blood. The two Fathers gingerly tiptoe across it while the children trudge behind. The children’s skins, peeled back by firebombs and the lips of doughy priests, ble
ed easily. Who will protect them? the mother wonders. The Pope has instructed the Faithful to pray in perpetuity to cleanse the Church of Predators. The children wonder who, if not he, with staff and crown and lamb and beneficent smile, will be on their side?

  The child also wonders while questions are being asked, whether the Pope has seen her lamb, perchance.

  The Vatican has said that every parish should designate a group of people to pray in a kind of relay for the Church to rid itself of scandal. Prayer will take place in one parish for twenty-four hours and then move on to another so that there might be continuous prayer. In the fourteenth century, to rid the world of the Black Death, the Church instituted a similar policy of Perpetual Prayer.

  From the very depths of darkness the men shake hands—over the bodies of the maimed and dying or not quite dead, or the definitely dead children. The two Fathers are in a friendship trance. Even though they are quite tiny on the TV screen, and in real life they are in Washington DC, which is quite a ways away, the mother puts up her black umbrella anyway for protection. She has been made custodian on earth of this very child, and she will not let her down. Not on her watch will a raft of unbearably lonely priests take her away under the guise of the First Scrutiny or the Sanctification or Special Intentions. Not on her watch will the President remove the children in a coma on a stretcher to a place off camera where they will be left to die, counted with deepest regret as collateral damage. The soul alights strangely, and the souls of children flutter at the Andrews Air Force Base. Sometimes we sense the devil where the devil does not belong—under the Pontiff’s hat, or hiding wedged in between the lines of the Constitution, that remarkably shiny document, the sleeping Congress nodding off. There might be glimpses of the devil in a wink or a pat or an embrace. A clever devil has been known to hide in a glass of golden ale, or an anthem or a cliché or a prayer—things we are almost but not quite numb to, the devil hides there.

  There is always the threat of invasion to guard against. Every single child who has ever lived is aware of this. Those both dead and alive. And all those sentenced to Limbo: they are beautiful, but they are neither here nor there.

  The question might be, why let a fetus through if in only a few years, this is what you are going to do? The Pope does not know. The Pope is happy to confess to all he does not understand under the category the Mystery of Evil. He has also been known to attribute it to the Dark Night of the Soul, but never mind, let us meditate on the miracle of cats.

  Bunny Boy, who in a certain sense is crimeless, has lived happily enough with the Neutering Process.

  The War Crimes President has insisted that an enhanced interrogation technique called waterboarding is not torture and so . . . He fidgets now wondering what the mother, who has always been a problem solver, has in store.

  The Pope holds a small Frozen Charlotte and a cat and a glass dome. Under the glass dome is a little model of Vatican City. The little dome glints in the sun.

  You’ve got to hard-wire certain rituals into a child early; otherwise they might not take. You’ve got to take advantage of the Genuflect Reflex while you’ve got it, as it is only so long before the Genuflect Reflex dissolves into cake.

  Mother Teresa is now known to have doubted everything. For one year she had God visions, but then she never saw or felt God’s presence again. Only that God was a desert. She wanted God with all the power of her soul—and yet between them, there was only a terrible separation.

  25

  TO ELIMINATE THE gray wolf, those going westward in the Great Western Expansion introduced mange into the wolf population. For forty days they waited for the mange to take and then set out on their way. A wave of suffering preceded them, and a wave of suffering was left in their wake. The suffering made a sound pitched just above the hearing range of the adults, but all the girls could hear it, and it made their trips in the covered wagons excruciating. Many of the girls in this weakened condition became susceptible to cholera and other catastrophic illnesses. Perhaps it was a kindness to die, they thought to themselves, by the side of the road rather than endure the intolerable screeching in their ears.

  The adults forged on, having buried their girls by the side of the road, and were praised for their courage and stamina in the face of the last images of their daughters holding their ears. They continued with even greater resolve. Their girls will not have died in vain. Native plants, native animals, and finally native people were in the way of the great westward progress to Hollywood. The wolves lost fur in patches all over their bodies. Mangy wolves, without fur, are susceptible to freezing to death in the winter or catching fire in the summer. Like fire, however, and young girls, the gray wolf can never really be extinguished. Like fire, you cannot snuff out a girl or a wolf. But no matter, the pioneers did not allow this to deter them. The mother and the child closed the book. The history lesson for the day lay heavy in them. What could she do, the child wondered, for those children who were already dead over a hundred years?

  Much of the west, toward which they strived with such fervor and at such cost, is a desert. Cities are built on sand in drought. Rivers are dammed and debilitated. Every time the child opened her history book, something else like this was popping up at her. Their fevers rose to 105. The girls were covered in flat, rose-colored spots.

  THEY RISE UP again now, the girls, as if out of that same place—though over a century and a half has passed. Women and children emerge from the mist on the horizon line still in pioneer dress, still emptying the bit bucket. Look, the child says, calling for the mother. Come quickly! The mother and child stand mesmerized. There before them are the girls in home-sewn, ankle-length dresses, with their hair pinned up in braids, tilling small gardens, pumping water, and doing chores in the shadow of an eighty-foot gleaming limestone temple. Self-sufficiency is paramount, because the Apocalypse is near.

  Mothers and daughters work together on the Yearning for Zion Polygamist Ranch. What is the use, the mother wonders, of taking such good care of a girl—making her clothes by hand; feeding her only the freshest and most wholesome of foods: whole grains, fruits, and vegetables; giving her fresh air; keeping her far from the cities and the fumes and the bad influences; making sure she is happy and fit—if you are only going to hand her over to the fifty-year-old Fathers in the end? What is the use if you are just going to offer her up joyfully to become a child-sister-wife?

  The women in gingham and bonnets look up curiously; they do not remember this part. What is the use of surviving on the plains if your own mother is going to hand you over before you are grown? The child brides cannot read or write or state the date of their births, the TV is saying. In the outside world avert your eyes, they are instructed. In the outside world avoid the color red, for that color is reserved for Jesus Christ who will return to the earth wearing red robes one day. The mother shuts off the TV. Enough, she says.

  In the Great Girl Giveaway, the Indian girl, Little Bird, was taken by an opposing tribe where she was turned into a slave and named Sacajawea, and that tribe, when the time came, was all too happy to sell her to a Canadian fur trader three times her age, as a wife.

  Enough, the mother says, but at night the girls follow them into sleep. On the Polygamist Ranch the men take girl children as brides, and so the girls know it is only a matter of time. Where are the mothers when they are needed? One of the girls dreams of introducing mange into the Father Population. When the fathers come near, too sunburned and with patchy fur, they howl in the dirt. There is a resourcefulness to girls in trouble, the child thinks to herself.

  The child says that she has seen the girls staring into the soup pots in a daze, dreaming, like all girls, of their futures. Once the soup is evaporated, they will meet their husbands, so it becomes the child’s job to provide a constant source of soup for the girls so that the pot will never be gone. The mother marvels at the miracle of the child: her poise, her good sense, her intelligence, her resourcefulness, her beauty.

  WHEN UNCLE INGMAR com
es with his giant steps, the sea level will drop. Don’t forget, the mother whispers to the child, to fill the pot.

  THE CHILD NUDGES the mother and points. On the horizon a tiny flame. She sees fire in the distance. At last, after the proper time of mourning, the Torch is revived. There it is, she is sure of it, glinting near the Muir Woods, in the City of Forests.

  THE THREE SCHOOLGIRLS hold evergreen sprigs. The mother is grateful that all along the children have made themselves visible to her, that they are whole, and that they have not, in all the chaos, lost their backpacks.

  THE WHO HAS Hair Where Conversations had begun. Except on her head, as of yet, the child had none. In a few years after all the hair had sprouted, the child would look at her mother strangely. With the hair in private places there would be a need for other privacies, and this would increase over time until finally the child would be gone. At the same time the Boy in the Glen was having the Why, When, and How Deep or High Are Boys’ Voices Conversation at home with his father.