Mother and Child Read online

  In the Miracle Theater a boy’s chest was being opened, and from it a flock of birds flew. It was the time of the Bird Count, and the child was handed a tally book and a pencil. But just as she began counting, a commotion arose, and the birds scattered.

  Step away, step away, the Vortex Man implored as a large aquarium draped with a sheath was rolled into the Court. In one elegant gesture, he removed the velvet shroud that draped it.

  Behold the creature dreaming in its amniotic sac, the place it will reside these next nine months. Elaborate memory tracks are being laid down there, my friends, from the dappled, shadowed world. Associations and sensations are flooding in and being held by the fluid. See for the first time what it sees. On the overhead projector, the close-ups shot from the fetus’s point of view resembled flora and lacy ferns and fauna.

  The dreamy fetus floats remembering nothing, or so we suppose. Ladies and gentlemen, the fetus is remembering right now. And the fluid retains the memory for a thousand years. Note the beautiful greeny-blue umbilicus attached to the world—like a luminous garden hose.

  COME ONE, COME all, and I will show you a species of dreamers unrivaled in the history of the world. Lost to us for millennia. The more you learn about them, the more you will love them, these beautiful dreamers, and the more you will miss them. From a distant millennium—now retrieved for the first time ever and coming soon here to the Spiegelpalais. The mystery at the heart of the cosmos remains intact—insoluble to us with our limited consciousness—but not to the Large-Headed Hominid. Come see its majestic brain—with an internal life we cannot begin to fathom. Come have life’s mysteries at last illuminated. At last—all that lies outside our grasp. Find yourself—

  On a foundering ship no more.

  Hostage to the Concrete Rabbit no more.

  WHO ARE YOU? the child inquired of the Vortex Man.

  You may be wondering, the Vortex Man bellowed, indeed who I am and why we have all gathered here. For a moment everyone stopped what they were doing and there was absolute silence. At the still point of the turning world, the Vortex Man spoke:

  You have come from near and far. You have worked tirelessly, you have been faithful and true. A drama of cosmic proportions is about to be staged. Life and Death before our eyes shall vie for the Mother and Child. And a spotlight illuminates them. Both Heaven and Earth. See how they hover in a hanging liminal place, not quite here, but not quite there either. Death vies for them, but so does Life. Each side possesses its seductions, oh yes, its considerable charms, oh yes. Both sides. It is twilight. Or is it dawn? Who is to say? The body collects both sleep and song.

  Who shall be victorious in the end? Even the Vortex Man does not know.

  These and other enigmas shall be contemplated. Behold the Luna Moth. And the Wolf. And the Death Cat. And the mossy path. And the snow. And the lavish green dreaming of the fallen tree.

  Staged will be the Eternal Questions for all to ponder:

  Why is the man drawn irresistibly to the whale, only to murder it?

  Why is it that when we might have gone forward, we stepped back?

  If the child severs the silk tether prematurely, what does it mean for her?

  Why did we hesitate? And when in our hesitations did we become part of the Too Late.

  And where is Uncle Ingmar going now in winter with the grandfather clock strapped to his back? These and other existential conundrums shall be pondered . . .

  And with this, the Vortex Man made his exit.

  IN THE WINGS, the Cocoon Theater troupe and the wolf-escorts waited. Dapper, stage right, magnified, Mr. Min stood in blue light pulling swollen bats from a hat.

  The Virgin in blue, accompanied by a little deer, and holding a lantern, moved majestically to the center. She’s looking for the child, but the child has hidden behind the mother’s skirt and for now is out of view. The Virgin says she’d like to take the child. She’s come, she says, for the child.

  The Virgin assumes rightly that if she can only cajole the child to come with her, the mother will come too.

  LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, children of all ages—and before them out of nowhere, the blue stars of the Cone Nebula, and the dazzling Horsehead Nebula.

  All was beauty and brightness. There was a preponderance of antlers and whiskers and shining coats.

  Irrefutable is the night, but the light show is unrivaled and the mother and child stand in awe at the mouth of the nebula. And suddenly the astounding figure of the Grandmother from the North Pole in the lights of the aurora borealis appears in the heavens.

  She points and directs the mother’s gaze to the room where Aunt Inga lay.

  Bathed in light, the mother takes the child’s hand and climbs over the large slumbering body of Aunt Inga. The room her younger sister sleeps in is shaped, it seems, like a curving shell. There is a whirling feeling and a whooshing sound. The child asks if they might rest here awhile.

  No they may not, the mother says.

  The Virgin whispers, it’s nearly time. The play is about to begin. Everything is ready now.

  As if the strange mix of anticipation and dread were finally too great, the mother falls into a dream, and in her dream she sees quite clearly that the small eternal flame has been left unattended, and the Spiegelpalais has caught fire. Smoke fills the atrium. It becomes so heavy that she can see nothing at all. Where has everybody gone? she wonders. She cuts a drowsy swathe through the smoke. Never has she seen so many sleepers piled one on top of the other, on top of the other, or such thickness, or experienced such peace. There is a thicket of sleep; there is a mountain of sleep.

  Lined against the walls were the Seven Sleepers—the polar bear, the snow goose, the arctic fox, the wolverine, the ermine, the vole, the snow leopard—awaiting reanimation. Every stage of sleep could be seen. Before the mother, a caribou was in the process of going still—a foreleg stiffened, the eyes went glassy, and it began to list to one side. It is promised one day, the Vortex Man said, that each shall be retrieved.

  She has to pull herself out of the dream now as if a figure out of marble. She knows, above all else, she must keep her eyes open. She rouses the slumbering child and puts her on her back, and in the last moment before it is too late forever, they make their way over the hordes of beautiful sleepers through flames and the irresistible pull of smoke toward home.

  That was a close call, the child says.

  The mother smiles. It certainly was.

  THE MOTHER OPENED her eyes and recalled nothing of the dream, only that she was refreshed and free of worry and care. She had not missed a thing. She looked to the stage. Everyone had taken their seats. The glass orchestra had been joined by the children’s choir, and now a hurdy-gurdy could be heard, and a bone piano, a panpipe, and a herald horn. Never, the mother remarked, had music ever sounded so beautiful. Final announcements were being made signaling the play was about to begin. When she looked in the wings, the mother saw all the players were now lined up loosely in order of appearance.

  A narrative of great mystery and beauty was about to unfold. A struggle, as they had been told, of epic proportions, if that peculiar fellow was to be believed. It was an odd position to be in, the mother thought—to be at once both part of the audience and part of the performance, and even though they would be entirely at the mercy of the script, something about that comforted her.

  Minutes passed. There was some snafu, she was sure of it, and the pageant was delayed, and she felt suddenly relieved to think there might still be a little more time left. The music, however, seemed to suggest otherwise. The overture began to play, introducing many of the key scenes to come. They looked at their programs and read, The Disappearance of the Lamb, The Mothering Place, The President in Evening Coat, The Appreciation Cake, The End of Childhood . . .

  Music for a while, the mother sang to herself, shall all your cares beguile . . . Another phrase came to her and through it she tried to hold on to the shrinking world before her, framed by red velvet curtains. Music
. . . source of gladness . . . heals all sadness.

  If she was sad, she was not cognizant of it. Still, thinking about the play before her about to begin, tears streamed down her face.

  The dog Shimmer, though he wouldn’t be needed until the third act, bounded onto the stage. Let him run outside until his time has come. And the same for the Hamster Ball lovelies. Release them into the meadow and into the sky: the Dall Sheep, the Gray Goose, the Arctic Tern, until the end.

  The Grandmother from the North Pole sat beside the mother for a moment and handed her a bowl of cloudberries. The mother smiled at her mother and accepted the deep blue bowl graciously and fed a few to the child who was growing restless.

  Just then two children holding a banner appeared on the stage and recited:

  Welcome to our play.

  The banner read, Scene 1—Pastoral, Spring.

  It’s a Pastoral!

  Someone turned on the fog machine.

  No, it’s a ghost story.

  Frogs could be heard.

  A dream within a dream . . .

  The curtain opened.

  4

  figments

  GHOSTS GATHERED IN the early hours while the mother and the child stretched a mesh between two poles at the pond. They had come, as they did many mornings, to extract water from fog. Though they were far from the sea, the mother heard the doleful sound of a lighthouse and felt the eerie piercing glow coming from it. After the net was secured, the mother and child sat in the grass.

  If the child were a monkey, she might take the mesh to the tallest trees and install it there. If the child were a monkey, there would be cymbals and a little hat and an organ grinder. Many people do not realize that a little organ grinder monkey, not the chimp or the ape, is the next smartest mammal after man.

  After a while, the pond slowly came into clarity, and the sun came up. It is strange the way one state is always bleeding into another.

  Frogs are a sentinel species. The skin of a frog is permeable. Recently, frogs have been growing longer legs or extra legs. Boys catch these frogs in boxes and bring them to science class.

  Frogs can be said to have beautiful voices, especially at mating season, but one part per billion of weed-killer in the water shrinks the voice box of the male frog, and they cannot sing their song so well. The earth was turning from one kind of place into another. This frightens the mother who knows all things must change.

  She looked at the monkey, now a child again.

  All the frogs in the world were singing their crooked songs in the fog. The child did not think the songs crooked, she thought the frog songs lovely. They were the only frog songs she had ever known.

  THE MOTHER DIRECTS the child to the eyepiece of the microscope. Ordinarily, if you cut open a bee, its insides viewed under a microscope appear white, the mother said. But these bees were black with scar tissue and disease. Everything you can think of is wrong with them, including new pathogens never before sequenced. The mother knows well that there is a trigger that takes an otherwise borderline population and throws it over the edge.

  The mother opens the Report on the Status of Pollinators. It is said that pollinator decline is one form of global change that has the potential to alter the shape and structure of the terrestrial world. They were a people at risk. The disappearance of the adult bee population presaged the human disappearance.

  A drift of soldiers came up and over the hill, babbled into their radios, and then vanished.

  The tortoise, untroubled, looks up and slowly says, the disappearances have happened before, and will happen again. The truths of the universe are so profoundly concealed. The mother and child hung on to his every word. You’ve no need to worry. And with that, its great liquid eye shut.

  EXILED FROM CHILDHOOD, but in the constant presence of it, the mother felt covetous of the child sometimes because the child still had childhood, and to the mother, childhood was no longer accessible.

  Even the mother’s mother, the Grandmother from the North Pole, was not young anymore. The light was bright late into the night in summer at the North Pole. When the North Pole Grandmother came with a platter of fish preserved in vodka and lingonberries, the fish had a face on it and the children ran and hid. The candles were lit then and there was juniper and holly.

  The child was busy in the corner making a sculpture of a rabbit out of a carrot. Next she was sculpting a boat. On the table sat the Red Book of Existence. Even the child will one day die. It takes three cups of salt to cure a fish. The mother tries to remember being small, not as an adult remembers, but as a child, though it is hard. She would like to fit inside a thimble, and someday she probably will.

  There is a casket the size of a walnut shell that waits in the garden. There is a husk. There is always the sorrow of the last morsel of fish to consider. Many of the children are still hiding in the garden. When she was little, she remembers going into the sewing box and taking out her favorite thing: a pincushion encircled by Chinamen. When she was small, she remembers the bright thimble and the way it looked like a castle on her thumb. The Grandmother from the North Pole was there then in the next room where she could hear her preparing the fish.

  Lingonberries are something else she remembers. While the mother reaches to remember, the child wishes she had a picture phone so that while she talked to the Grandmother from the North Pole she could see her face and watch her white hair blowing in the wind.

  The lifespan of a North Pole Grandmother is eighty-three, the child reads.

  THE MOTHER HAD no use for computers and could not accompany the child as she entered the world of ciphers and shadows and glyphs, but the Grandmother from the North Pole, who loved nothing more than the future, gladly went wherever the child took her and was always happy to be able to learn something beautiful and new. The child put her grandmother’s hand on the cursor, and enigmatic, translucent fields were revealed.

  It was marvelous, she thought, floating in the digital universe. At these times, above all, the Grandmother from the North Pole thought it was wonderful to be alive.

  A blue multitude of children huddle around her. They’ve just come in from the blueberry patch. See them now as they dose off with their full buckets: Lars, Bibi, Ingmar, Anders, Sven. Baby Inga must be at home, or maybe she is not born yet.

  Before the screen’s deep glow, the Grandmother said, I should like to write the Book of Wonder before I die, and her eyes sparkled.

  IT WAS A privilege to live so near the river, that is what the mother always said. Silt passed through them some mornings and the mists worked themselves into the ways they thought about things. The child found fish in her pockets and river rocks in her pockets, and the sense of weight and immensity filled them, and many days they walked immersed in water and water-song.

  There was swell and verge in the world. In spring, the banks surged. In the winter when the river froze, the mother and child read about how once cakes of ice were cut from it and stored in small icehouses. The river fed their notions of spaciousness and hope. They imagined carrying great cakes of ice in the shapes of hearts to the neighbors.

  They would put the cakes on a baby’s feverish head. Or preserve a fish for the Christmas Eve dinner.

  The child was thankful that the mother treated the river like a god. Some Sundays, they would spend the whole day lazing on its banks. They found fossils and slate and shale, and trains went by, and people from the city could be seen blinking in the windows. Then all was quiet again, and the train, sleek and fleeting, was gone. The child grew sleepy. The river made everything in the Valley radiant, even at night.

  At night, the mother said, the river crept into their beds, and they could wade out until it was over their heads, and at that very place in the river there would be a birch canoe waiting to meet them. The child loved this part most of all, floating in the boat, and waving to the people on the other side who waited. She thought she could even see a girl about her age.

  Before the mother and child
arrived, the Indians had already lived here for thousands of years.

  THE MOTHER WOKE the child before dawn and told her that she was to quickly dress because they would be going with the elders today on a bird-watching expedition. The child liked the sound of it: a bird-watching expedition. The mother loved bird-watching because it fostered the things she valued most: attentiveness, patience, care. What should have been a white stripe on the head of the smallest bird in the deepest wood, if one looked carefully and was very quiet and did not move, was actually orange because of the abundance of berries in the bird’s diet at this time of year. So much, the mother thought, depends on this. This watchfulness. The mother liked standing there in the dew in the sweet fleeting early hours of the day. What could be held could be held only for an instant—all the rest was held in the mind. A sighting, then a flitting away. And then the linger. That dream. It was a beautiful, prolonged instant, this being prepared, ready to let whatever flew into the field of vision be caressed by the eye.

  When the child awoke that morning, the mother had handed her a bird atlas in which to make notes and record the names of the birds she saw. Standing in the meadow, suddenly and with great force the child was overwhelmed by the desire to fill the entire bird atlas. She was taken aback by the feeling—she had no idea where it had come from. She tried to quell it, for otherwise she would have to run around and shout with glee, which might scare away the elders and the birds.

  Mostly they were very quiet, but sometimes the elders made sounds—phisshhhhhhh and phoshhhhhhh—and this seemed to call the birds to their sides. The child liked the sound, and she thought she would try it at home when their cat Bunny Boy was in the house.