Mother and Child Read online

  THE CHILD PICTURED the Girl and her mother together. She hovered at the nape of her mother’s neck like a small marsupial. Something with a pouch, something with a marsupium. It was a beautiful sight.

  Though neither the mother nor the child can actually see her, the Girl with the Matted Hair has retreated deep into the woods where she was beginning her first preparations for the Hamster Ball.

  THE ICE WAS changing to water, the young to old. The Poles were dissolving. Infinitesimal bits of the child’s body carried by the mother slowly began to melt, and the North Pole Grandmother could only feel the barest trace of her own children anymore. Still it was wonderful, wasn’t it—lichen was collecting on the antlers of Santa’s reindeer. Wild night swirled all around them and the collisions of dark stars. Life was an adventure—whenever she was with the Grandmother she felt that.

  When the Grandmother was a girl, she told the child, she liked to ice fish, and each year right before the Mistletoe Feast, they would fish for a fortnight. Sometimes the child called the Grandmother from the North Pole my Snowmere, and she would hug her, and she would say to her, remember that enormous snowman several stories high that we once saw together? Even in summer, Snowmere, she said to the Grandmother from the North Pole, you will never melt, and she hugged her shrinking grandmother hard.

  THE MOTHER THINKS of the Grandmother from the North Pole, and she knows that inside the child resides the mother too, for the mother has never walked on this earth without the Grandmother from the North Pole; she has never walked with only her one body, but always with multiple bodies. She knows even now she still carries the Grandmother from the North Pole inside her. Otherwise, how to account for the blue lips, or the antlers, or the seal whiskers, or the night?

  28

  soul

  THE EXTERMINATOR HAD come to size up the situation. There were multiple problems, he said, quietly, descending the attic stairs. And this was not counting the wasps and the white hornets, the mice and chipmunks, the flying squirrels, or the solemn congregation of moths. Okay, the mother whispered. She had heard the great collision of flying foxes above her head thudding to the floor. There was that, yes. She knew that there were sick cows known as Downers making their way across the floor above her head. She already could tell they were not well by the way they lapsed and tripped across the ceiling, their odd syncoptic step. Yes, she knew about that. The exterminator shook his head.

  It had been a wet springtime and now it was nearly summer. She heard a warped waltz coming from the rafters. Soon it would be prom night again, and the teenagers in the car in the dark in the rain would careen through the night. By dawn they too would join the others in the attic.

  Inert objects were quietly being transformed into talismans of obtuse meaning and beauty. A car fender gleamed. Liquid glass and steel beams from the fallen towers were being fused into safety walls and fallout shelters, obdurate and durable. A pocket watch, a tattoo, a love letter, a birth certificate, a passport were all playing their parts. The everyday dreamers were reviving and reanimating the scene. Meanwhile, as they sat cataloging the inhabitants, an ominous announcement was made over the loudspeakers. A quarantine had been placed on the Valley. No one was to leave the attic.

  The influenza had arrived.

  Outside, birds dropped from the sky.

  COMPELLED INTO THE dark forest after midnight, the mother, in a brown suede coat, went out in search of a buck in order to mate. In her mind it had seemed that she had ventured far into the night driven by desire, deep into the heart of the forest, though in reality, but a few moments had passed before she was shot dead through the heart.

  That night long ago, the hunters ran to find their prize, but when they realized their mistake, they were sore afraid—what was a woman with a brown suede coat and hoofs doing out in the forest during the rut? they wondered, and horrified, they covered her body with leaves and fled.

  Meanwhile, the deliriously hallucinating mother sees the enormous buck in the wood and she calls to it with lust’s strange call. The planet is suspended in darkness, and there is violence and mystery at the heart of existence. Sexual congress provides wild, new life—a life impervious to bullets or harm—and the mother gets up at last, and brushing off the dry leaves and moss and twigs, she makes her way home where the child, sitting at the window, waits.

  The men who had covered her steaming body with leaves had fled the scene utterly, but their fleeing stayed in them, and many times they returned to the place where nothing was left but a light brown suede coat. There were no other earthly remains—not hair, not bones, not hoofs, and for the rest of eternity, the woman stalked the men and haunted them.

  SHE OPENS HER arms as if for the first time. The artist, the magician, the cat have any number of lives, the mother sings, and so do I! Sparkle is surrounding us, she says. And glitter, and bits of paper—that is what I find so astonishing.

  THE SPIEGELPALAIS IS flooded with bluish greenish light. Today they read if it were possible to see the universe from afar, it would appear pale green, somewhere between turquoise and aquamarine. What a beautiful thought that is, and they feel unaccountably serene. She drifts without fear. Someone has come to console them. The light of blue stars combines with the light of red stars, to produce aquamarine. We float in a vast—but vast cannot begin to describe it—infinity of bluish green.

  THE MOTHER HAS turned into a boat and is travelling in a northerly direction downstream against the prevailing north wind. She is carrying the Grandmother from the North Pole, the child who is a baby, a package and a bower of roses. A beautiful conduit, a vessel, but nothing more. On the journey, the mother must transfer a package she has carried her whole life but has been forbidden to open. The package is off-limits to the mother—it is just something she must bear. This gift from the Grandmother is to be passed to the child through the mother’s body. Afloat, astounded, the infant opens the glowing box. She holds the gorgeous glowing braid of the genetic code, reserved just for her, in wonder. The Grandmother and child step onto the shore hand in hand, cradling the gift.

  The mother, rose-laden, having done what she has come to do, drifts off. The smell of roses is overwhelming. German scientists say that the scent of roses perceived during REM sleep leads to the most astonishing of all dreams.

  JUST LIKE ALL children, the child would leave before too much longer. The electronic world, shining and mysterious with its bleeps and trills, beckoned.

  The mother would pack a little bundle for the child to carry there. In the sack she would put a pinecone, an acorn, a branch of berries, beeswax, an evergreen sprig.

  WHEN THE GRANDMOTHER from the North Pole gets back into the boat for a moment and lies down under a blanket of roses and closes her eyes and rests awhile and smiles, she is really paying homage to the mother; she is really saying that she thinks it’s okay—the person her daughter has become.

  IT WAS REALLY all right: the mother was lost, but to what no one knew—to her daydreams, or visions, or whatever it was, as the child too would one day be lost to the glyphs floating past on the blue screen. The Grandmother from the North Pole beckons her daughter to join them in the next room on that cool electronic field, but the mother, sparkling in her own right, demurs, and gently closes the door.

  For the mother, there is no obvious way out of the labyrinth.

  PERPETUAL READINGS WERE being held in the hopes of setting off a Memory Chord. On the second day of the readings there seemed to be some eye flickering that signaled recognition. Photographs had been placed on an altar, and the elders stared at them. Once I could see birds, but now simply the presence of birds is enough, one of the elders, the bird-watcher, had once said.

  All stood on a veranda and looked out onto an indefinite field. In the near distance, a figure could be seen sitting under a fig tree.

  How beautiful is the aging process, the Grandmother from the North Pole thinks.

  WHEN THE GRANDMOTHER from the North Pole becomes suddenly woozy and fall
s to the floor, the mother far off in the Valley rises automatically from her bed and lifts the window sash where snow has begun to fall. She looks for her where the medians of longitude converge.

  The mother’s hair stands on end. She is something winged now as she leaves the window. She is iridescent.

  THE CHILD PULLS at the mother’s sleeve. They had fallen asleep in front of the giant screen. Except for the mother and child, the theater has been vacated. She points to the dark stage as if something is about to happen. And suddenly before them. Mother, look!

  THE EARTHQUAKE IN GinGin Province killed over ten thousand children. Mothers rushed to the sites. Most of the schools were too flimsy to hold children in the event of a catastrophe. The wreckage is filled with the bodies of children. On top of the findable children’s bodies, small branches of pine, evergreen sprigs have been left. Many of the children’s backpacks remain even now, and books are everywhere.

  Too many of the dead are children in a country where families are allowed to have one child, and one child only. Some parents are digging with their hands for their only children, but many of the only children are now dead, and even if permission were granted, some of the parents are too old to have another.

  THE SCHOOLS WERE among the most flimsy buildings in GinGin. The GinGin mother is not flimsy, but she is at the mercy of the Flimsy World she has placed her child in. Schools are a keystone in any community. Schools are relied upon in a society to fulfill one of the most important missions of all. The schools should have been greatly bolstered and fortified.

  The bodies there had turned to vapor, and the city was enveloped by ghosts. If the GinGin government acquiesces for a time and allows people to conceive another child to replace the one under the rubble, this time the people of GinGin Province vow they will build a better child. Instead of waiting for the schools to be upgraded, they will take matters into their own hands. The people are determined that next time they will build a fortified child, a child with an astounding rebar structure and reinforcing rods. A guard against disasters and further tragedy.

  The government, for once in accordance with the parents, thinks that instead of retrofitting the buildings, it would be better to come up with a way of retrofitting the children, seeing as they are such precious resources to their parents. In the future, the goal of the government as well will be to build a better child. An indestructible child. A child with a more solid armature—an earthquake-resistant child. Concrete slabs might replace the thighs, and they might be reinforced with steel rods and supporting braces. Iron rods in concrete could boost the resilience of the child’s central columns. As an early warning system, their blood would be designed to detect the motion of magma, the bubbling and broiling from a distance moving toward them. Children then might walk with ease through the Trembling World, and there would be no long banners with dead children’s names written in their parents’ blood. A child fifty stories tall might be the norm. A child like no child anyone has ever seen before.

  BUT FOR STRUCTURES and children to withstand an earthquake, the ground itself must hold together, and so along with building a better child, it will be necessary to build a better earth. When loose or wet soil shakes, parts of the soil rotate, and the soil then acts like a liquid or a gelatin.

  A foundation firmly connected to solid rock, deep in the ground, is required. Beams and columns of child must be strapped together on the rocks with metal, and the floors and tops of the child must be securely fastened to the walls. Then the child must be sprayed with liquid concrete and reinforced with steel brackets. The brain must be bolted to the skull.

  A certain amount of swaying and flexing must be built in. The future is a swaying motion. A tall girl who does not flex and sway might crack or collapse.

  THE SOUTH TOWER was the second tower to be hit, but it was the first to fall. She watched it buckle and sway and warp. Firefighters who reached the crash zone before the building broke up described seeing two pockets of fire. This is what she knows: that buildings should be able to withstand disaster, that mothers once standing should continue to stand, that children should never perish. A plume of smoke appears behind the mother’s head.

  OUTSIDE THE SCHOOLHOUSE amidst the rubble, a mother from GinGin Province was weeping. I hope God will give my daughter a chance to survive. I can lose anything in this world—except my daughter.

  THE SCHOLAR CHONG Heng invented the first earthquake detector in the year 132. On a bronze vase, eight dragonheads and toads were arranged to work like a pendulum, and when the earth shook, a brass bell would pass from the mouths of the dragons to the mouths of the toads.

  A mother sits next to the rubble of what once was her child’s school and waits. She refuses to move. Weeks pass, months.

  In addition to the fortification of the children, the mothers’ hearts must be replaced next time with stainless steel hearts.

  THE SOUL DOES not adhere to the bones of the deceased but flies up and is free, this the mother believes. The Egyptians thought the soul was placed in an eternal chamber, and a sheep was sent to guard it.

  THE PRODIGY PLAYS a black cello made of carbon. In fact, all the instruments are carbon for the occasion, as carbon fares better in frigid temperatures and there is now the question of the unseasonable cold to consider. There are no flowers here today, only carbon and cold. A carbon cello has a flooding, deeper sound than a cello of wood.

  GIRLS ARE GATHERED together and held for one more afternoon in the light of the schoolyard. The next time you see them, they will have disappeared, and young women will have taken their place. The girls ride their horses, talk their talk, giggle, sing loo-loo and la la la. This is the day when childhood becomes irretrievable, though no one will realize it until some time after. Though we could not have predicted the moment in advance—all had changed, as if in an instant.

  Without a doubt, the bat had presaged change. Still we linger, keep them in sunshine skipping here awhile longer in this afternoon, though it is getting darker and cooler already now. We dally—relishing the moment that, unbeknownst to us, has already passed. How else to account for the sudden sadness, the melancholy as evening comes on? They are bathed in last light, and then they are gone.

  AS CHILDHOOD COMES to an end, the Girl with the Matted Hair’s mother has already been dead for over ten years, and there is something unforgivable about that.

  Her resurrection concoction left forgotten now in the far corner of the schoolyard. Her recipes—drain the blood of the toad, pet five sleeping sheep—tucked into the stone wall.

  29

  CAREFULLY THEY WALKED into the Spiegelpalais. Even from the periphery they could feel the great sleep pulling at them, and they were afraid. The atrium’s walls were lined this day with fifteen metallic medicine cabinets filled with medication. Thirty sheep slept floating in thirty formaldehyde tanks arranged in rows, and they half resembled schoolchildren nodding at their desks. Nodding and humming, this multiplication of sleep made the child yawn. The sheep beckoning were branded in red with stencil. What do they want of us? The child tugged at her mother’s arm.

  Submerged in a twelve-foot tank slept two sides of beef, a chair, a row of linked sausages, an umbrella, and a birdcage housing a dead dove.

  The sheep were branded in red with a stencil. The child, anesthetized, dreamt on the floor of the Spiegelpalais, and the mother had to pick her up and carry her over her shoulder as she did when the child was an infant. More and more, the mother remembered Infant Time. All heads, sleeping and not, slowly turned toward the mother and child. The somnambulant sheep seemed to nod in their direction and gesture with their cloven hoofs. Their eyes were open, but not seeing, glassy and smooth, and the lightest light blue—like the mother’s eyes.

  THE CHILDREN GATHERED in the firefighting wing where many of the fire stories had been collected and preserved. Relics from the great incinerations were housed in glass. In one of the cases the children saw a scarlet bird, a glove, a briefcase, a burning bush, a rose the
size of a human heart, a father suspended in liquid. No one was sure if the objects behind glass had done the saving, or were part of the saved. It did not really matter—the child thought the fire world was beautiful.

  WONDER POURED DOWN on their heads. Sometimes the adventure of being alive felt too great. On these days, something began to fray in her. Smoke was filling the stairwell.

  Oddly, as there would have been time, she might have said billowing while she looked out the window, which in turn sounded like pillow . . . pillowing, as she grew sleepier and sleepier with each breath.

  A PLATOON OF soldiers, enveloped in smoke, drift to the shore. Every one of them is dead. They have been snuffed out like wicks. They have nodded off and could be revived no more.

  But should living soldiers ever return, should any war ever be over again, on that day the mother will eat the pasta called campanile—campanile is Italian for bells—and they will dance with a kind of joy reserved only for the most auspicious of occasions: the Great Resuscitation, or the return of the bees, or Easter.

  LATER, WHEN THEY were back in the house and the fire was lit, the child would take out a piece of paper and draw an elaborate prismatic snowflake, and underneath it she would print: The way nobody is perfect and God is. For now, they kept walking. The moon shone and the coyotes turned into liquid light and spilled into luminous shapes on the night’s page, and the light in turn was devoured by great swooping night creatures, not bats—she knew not what—and the world in its wonder and violence entered her and she did not flinch. The birds appeared, and flying wild cats in the night in primordial splendor and chaos abounded, undeterred by whatever civilization may have tried to tame or diminish.