Mother and Child Page 5

  The Sheep Killers liked city music, and while they were doing the chores, they played city music to the sheep. All in all the sheep had a pretty good life, even Uncle Lars had to agree: outside all day with the sweet grass and breezes on Curly’s Corners Road above Tivoli. It was the best view in the county. Look at them! And Uncle Lars drew the sheep in their slippers smoking pipes with their little sheep aperitifs, on a cocktail napkin.

  The Sheep Killers did not like to say “killed”; they liked to say “processed.”

  IN HER SLEEP now, she hears the black wing-beat. And in the morning when she awakes, the Red-Tailed Hawk circling above with its gimlet eye on Bunny Boy. Now it is a world where birds eat cats, and not the other way around. Now it is the season for the “time is out of joint” speech. The mother snatches Bunny Boy and cradles him in her arms, and she does not duck or cower even as the hawk dives at her. The mother, with the force of her Motherhood, a force which is something like reverse gravity, compels the bird back high into the sky and then pushes it away entirely. This time they are not forsaken; the mother’s powers are still intact.

  Later when the Grandmother from the North Pole hears the story, she says quite plainly that it should be perfectly obvious: the hawk had not come for Bunny Boy of course, but for Miss Frosty, the cat from next door who often appeared in the yard. She is emphatic—that hawk was coming for the old lame one. Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for Miss Frosty!

  MORE AND MORE, she was a transparency through which things passed. The self was a window that glimmered, the world outside wavy. The split maple tree had opened something in the mother that had remained closed down in her a long time. Be that as it may, the child wanted the mother to play with her.

  She imagined that the thing that had eluded her for so long might actually be within reach—had been there all along: not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf, just as the poet had said, but she could not see it—nor did she wish to. They took out the Tinker Toys. Today it would come no closer.

  ONE HUNDRED MILLION years ago, flowers appeared on the earth. Shortly after this, predatory wasps evolved into bees that fed on those flowers anew. The bees had left the hives, and they had not come back. Everyone on earth mourned their disappearance. What’s that? the child had asked. On the horizon, a force of human pollinators could be seen.

  The mother understood that the day that people were hired as hand-pollinators would mark the beginning of the end. It would not be long now until they too would perish. She said it out loud. Destroyed will be our remembrance from the earth.

  6

  absence

  IT WAS NEVER easy being a baby—being a baby meant being at the mercy of almost everything. Things appeared and disappeared before a baby’s eyes, and there was nothing a baby could do about it. The baby’s task was to become a master of the unresolved absence. Oblique is the angle, fragile is the whole setup: crib, changing table, layette, human outlines, mother figure.

  Because objects came and went all the time, a resourceful baby might make a wooden spool attached to a string that she could control simply by pulling the string or letting go. A spool so cool, so predictable, so easy to maneuver. So much better than the massive face that came and went at will and crooned peekaboo. Who is that? Uncle Ingmar, no doubt. The spool so much better, more solid, more comprehensible than the whims and figments that otherwise pass before an immobile baby’s eyes.

  A baby grown into a child will often still find the spool very useful. And even that child grown further into an adult might find that the spool is a very handy thing to have indeed. First many men were being lost at the front. Then, many men were being lost in the rice paddies or in the bamboo. And now on the outskirts of the ancient city, men and women and children were being lost again. In fact, not a day had passed in the history of the world without men and women and children lost somewhere. She reeled the spool out and it was gone. Then she reeled it back in. It was fun to play a frightening game. It was also fun to play a game where there would always be a satisfactory ending. Coping was what the child learned to do. There was a steady crown of stars around her mother’s head, though the mother could not see or feel them, and so to her they were of no use. But to the child, the stars were everything. The mother proper would come and go, but the stars remained. That is what the child learned to do. Whenever she wanted, she could close her eyes and see stars, or a glove, or whatever she needed to see. It was a neat trick.

  A band of itinerant magicians were making their way to the Spiegelpalais. Now you see it and now you don’t, they liked to say. Jugglers filled the void with brightly colored balls for a moment. For the duration of the evening, there were white lights and libations and song. Still the men were being lost, in and out of war, everywhere you turned.

  THERE IS A gloom in the day no one can shake. On the horizon they see a toy tractor enlarged to life size—all green except for black tires, a farmer astride it, waving to the neighbors perhaps or to the children, or to something that is not there.

  She once saw a boy painted bright white sitting on the floor playing with a toy truck. The truck was rendered in precise detail, but the boy was formless, amorphous, lost in play. Little crouching boy cast in stainless steel and painted white, mesmerized by his toy truck. Bending down to him, the child tries to see the look on his face, and she is surprised to see there that he has no face at all. All of the boy has gone into the truck, she thinks. There he is: in the grooves of the tires, the shining fender, the intricate steering wheel, rendered in the greatest of detail. He’s emptied himself there into the machine.

  He’s an abstracted boy; he’s not like the Boy in the Glen, who dances with panpipe in the wolf hollow and is filled with music. The space between the huddled boy’s hand and the truck take on a burden of almost unbearable weight. Still the child sits near him and puts her hand on his painted steel shoulder—hoping to help him, with whatever it is that is the matter.

  THE MOTHER RECEIVED a telephone call from her sister Inga. The sister had some bad news. The child had never seen her mother listen harder to anything than she listened then. The listening had a hard, smooth quality to it, like ice, only hot. After the mother hung up, she curled into a ball and she did not speak or move for a day and a night. The child watched her mother curled up like that, and she thought about nests and she thought about shells. She felt so alone she did not know how she would bear it—and she felt worn by silence and the duration of time.

  After a day and a night the mother finally uncurled, but the child saw the mother held something still clenched in her hand. When the mother saw the child, she wept and she opened her hand. In her palm she held the left ventricle of a human heart. The child took the left ventricle of the heart from her mother. She walked down the hallway and she laid it in her bed. Although it had looked blurry and ruined on the screen, here it did not look bad at all. She was happy to have it on the pillow next to her. It cast the room in ruby light. After pink, red was her favorite color. This way, if anything went wrong, she would know right away. She thought of her aunt seven and a half states away. A kindle of kittens appeared under the bed. A clowder of cats soon came to join them outside under the sill. After a while, the child fell into dream. Helpless and blind, the mother cat licked the kittens until they began to breathe. There was mother’s milk for all. Then the mother cat went outside again with the others.

  Everything seemed contingent on this arrangement: the clowder under the sill, the kindle under the bed, the ventricle next to the sleeping child, slowly repairing itself.

  THE SOLDIERS WERE battling sleep, the most formidable of all opponents, and with their rapiers they sliced the heavy air. The soldiers in endless procession walk through the somnambulant world, singing as they go, an antidote, they hope. It was an invisible adversary and therefore the most dangerous of all. They talked back and forth on their walkie-talkies and gave each other pep talks, but before long, they had found a nestling place and they all curled up like babes toget
her and succumbed.

  THE GRANDMOTHER FROM the North Pole came to dispel myths, to correct misconceptions. For instance, she says, if you throw a baby in the ocean, you should not worry because a baby will always float. Its head is rounder and lighter than an inflatable beach ball. And it possesses a supreme swimming memory from before its birth. Besides, the mother chimes in, if a baby doesn’t float, there’s always a lot of commotion and someone goes and saves it. I love to see them bouncing out there on the event horizon, the Grandmother said. Such a beautiful thing!

  A BABY SAILS like an inflated star craft high above the ocean, swooping and diving, skimming the surface and then flying back up.

  AND THERE’S GRANDFATHER, she says, sailing smooth and straight. On the pale blue. His sails are puffed. He’s still handsome.

  MUSIC MOVES THROUGH the left ventricle. And the curtains blow in the breeze.

  THE CHILD PUTS the ventricle in a doll’s cradle, attaches wheels to it, and paints it blue. From her book she knew about Permanent Doll State, and she hoped the heart would not lapse into Permanent Doll State forever. The Grandmother from the North Pole reassures her, and points to the sky.

  THE CHILD SITS high, high up and looks at herself in the mirror. There is something unnerving about a child dangling in the air while a hand bearing silver airborne scissors glides by. She is having her first haircut. The mother watches as the curls fall in slow motion to the floor. So many things are always falling. The tables fell through the floor, but that is another story. The mother and the child missed already the falling hair and all the feelings they had no names for.

  In the Valley, the Palatines dreamt of building boats, but the boats would not float, so they turned to coffin making, but lost heart after a while and decided to try their hand at tables. The Palatines loved tables as all men love tables. They loved tables as women love linens. Tables were a place to plan a strategy, arm wrestle, or drink a stout. But something was wrong with the tables.

  The tables were too heavy to lift, and they had a habit of falling through the floor like boats of stone. With coffins it did not matter how far they fell into the earth. In fact, the farther a coffin fell into the earth the better; this way they could layer the dead and the dead would not be quite so lonely or sad. Galileo tells us that the tables fall at the same rate as the child’s hair. The deeper the coffins sank, the more pleased everyone was with the arrangement.

  Sitting high, high up in that little executioner’s chair, the scissors and the child gleam. Some men, but not all, revere war. The dead in the Valley lay in layers. The mother gathered the child’s hair and placed it in a glassine envelope. There it will quietly lie through the years of peace and through the years of war.

  How many years would tresses fall? Falling on human time. The mother bends to the ground and collects the hair of the young men who will not come home again.

  The child’s hair fell a long way to the floor that day.

  THE MOTHER FOUND the men named Martin to be the best read of the men, and she preferred to have them for her friends, but they were far and few in the Valley. After the Risen Agains, and the Witnesses of God, the next most popular sect was the disciples of Baby Gabriella, or the Gabbies, as they were called. Whether Gabbies was a derisive name or not, she could not tell; she did not like to think about them. None of the groups read a whit as far as the mother could tell, though they all held books.

  There was a city, she knew, filled with reading men like her friend Martin, but it was hard to reach now, so instead she cut off her hair and put it in a Lucite box and left it by the door. The child hated when the mother cut her hair, but the mother promised her it would grow back on the third day. Our passage on earth is brief, but to make up for it, things happen at a dizzying rate. The number of miracles is inexhaustible and never used up, the mother says. That’s just the way life is. On the porch, the Lucite box began to breathe.

  She hoped this might attract wise men to her side. But wise men were scarce in the Valley.

  She might have liked a life where people read books and where many faces would come and go. She missed the big and beautiful city sometimes, and the Towers where Martin worked that had once presided.

  A PIKE IS swimming in the bathtub. A chicken foot is sticking out of the sink. In every room, there was singing and dipping and whirling. These are scenes from the men’s childhoods, and they created the deepest of longings in the mother. Kippered herrings passed before her eyes. Shining fish in their skins of gold. She names all the men Martin as they pass, after her friend Martin who had once delivered the news in his cupped hands. This is what he said, and she has never forgotten that cupped-handed gesture: the fetus is not in danger.

  The mother closes her eyes. Many years now had passed since the emergence of cinematic time. This made her smile. Anytime she wanted, she could see Martin again, or if she preferred, the long line of Martins walking, or the child Martin, all alone leaning over the bathtub to pet the bright pike.

  SHE PICTURES HERSELF climbing floor after floor with the men, higher and higher up into the sky. Books line the walls on every floor, and it occurs to her this must be a library of some sort, or some other kind of repository. When they get to the top and stand on the curving roof, she understands it to be the city she once loved, and she looks out and she is filled with joy. How beautiful you are! she calls out.

  Far below is the vortex: a commotion without sound, some sort of drama, hundreds of fire engines and ambulances rushing to the scene. The mother remembers standing high, high up, atop the beloved city. The mother remembers smoke, so much smoke, and at her back a searing heat. Between the mother and the ground far below, a force field now makes itself known and beckons her irresistibly to the street. The force becomes a pull so enormous that the mother names it Gloria so as to better withstand its call. She tries to step away, though all she wants is to move toward it now.

  IN THE WEE hours, the mother, woken by a sound, followed a small flame into the Vortex Garden. There, before much longer, she would abandon herself to it—its blue heart, its heat, its light. Here, despite the advice of Cecil Peter and the elders, she would allow herself to burn. How exquisite is the sensation, the pull of sleep and smoke, the reduction to ash. What the bat had said was to prepare, and the flame had concurred. Who was the mother in the face of such directives? She felt herself dissolve in fire. She understood it in an instant. Soon they would be taken.

  THE HOUSE SEEMED to grow light, and the air took on a peculiar quality—sparkly, as if you could see the bright molecules that made up the light. It looked something like pollen to the mother, and the mother was perplexed. The child wore a gleaming white dress and a veil and shoes with diamonds on the toes. The mother hoped it was not the child’s wedding day already. The child was still young, of this the mother felt certain. She took a few steps closer, and let out a sigh. It was the day of her First Communion. She was receiving the Body of Christ—that was all. No cause for alarm, she supposed. She could see it now. The bread, the wine; no cause for concern there, she guessed. There was no bridegroom yet to speak of.

  But the long pine casket—who was that for? She did not know. Oh, it was not a casket after all, but the tall box the grandfather clock had come in from the North Pole. The mother laughed as the girl came closer. There were still many years together left to them.

  7

  THE GAP IN the life expectancy was widening according to the morbidity table. It was another part of the National Nightmare. Socioeconomic disparities declined in tandem with a decline in the mortality rate. The child did not quite understand what this meant. She always thought of tandem and bicycles as going together.

  There was an island that allowed only bicycle traffic on it. The child sent away for a brochure. She and her mother might ride in tandem on a bicycle and breathe in the sea air. What could be better than a bicycle built for two? A bicycle was a good thing except that sometimes you saw things you did not want to, along the route. Poor people who were
hungry and without houses, Witnesses of God with butterfly nets, or psychics with their useless bits of free-floating information about your past lives. They always wanted to tell you that you were once a peasant in Russia or a soldier in the Civil War, or that you had perished in the South Tower.

  The mother was hoping that she and the child might live a long time together. When they pass the soothsayer in the bushes, the mother snarls, I was not a little girl in a babushka two centuries ago. Past lives are no comfort to her. I have this one little life, and the morbidity table, and the sea, and the sky, and the breeze, and the birds, and the bicycle, and the trees, and she opens her arms wide. Luckily the child is in the back to steer.

  A SEA BREEZE blows and light pours through the chambers of the heart. Aunt Inga falls asleep.

  THERE HAD BEEN a time once when the mother had a friend. Implausible as it seemed, they would go out to the bar on Ladies Night and have drinks with salt lining the rim in shapely glasses. Aside from these times with the friend, the mother had never drunk this drink, or any other. The friend had a small son, and she would bring him along to Ladies Night with her, and the mother would bring the child, and the children would play while the two mothers chatted and laughed and licked the salt and drank the drinks.

  One night, the friend told the mother that even though she was only thirty-two, she had been diagnosed with a serious illness and that there was probably a gene from thousands of years ago that could be traced back to a small European village that was responsible for it. The mother, who had been a nurse before the child was born, had an inkling of what the gene might be, and she went home and prayed. Then she called her friend on the phone.