Mother and Child Page 6

  The mother apparently did not understand other people well, even the friend. The mother, without realizing it, had activated a peculiar mechanism in the friend, and by the time she hung up, she realized that there would be no more room for friendship. Never again would they go out to the bar for drinks and laugh and chat.

  The mother thinks there are not enough human tears for certain kinds of sadness. When the mother sees the friend now, they wave to each other from a distance, but they are unable to cross the circle of salt each has drawn around the other.

  From her memory bank now, she remembers the laugh that once came out of one of the ladies’ mouth at the next table at Ladies Night. The laugh was coming out of the lady’s mouth, but the mouth was taut and unmoving, and it seemed like it must be some sort of trick mouth or artificial mouth, but still sound came out of it, and words. When the mother asked her friend, the friend said casually that this was a result of the Plastic Surgery. She was very matter-of-fact about it, and the mother had liked that. You never knew what you might hear or see, she thought to herself. This was the very reason that the mother and child did not often go out to a restaurant or a bar. But it was different when she was with the friend. With the friend she felt protected.

  LITTLE VORTICES BECAME big vortices, and the forward-going band of soldiers on horses began to turn in circles, faster and faster, and were carried up by the high and whirling winds into the sky where, frightened, they cried out for their mothers.

  CECIL PETER CAME in breathlessly and announced that the New Age of Funnels had definitively arrived, there could be no doubt. He drew mad spirals with chalk on the path and shouted as if otherwise he would not be heard. It frightened the mother to see Cecil Peter like this. How many able-bodied men had been taken and how many were yet to be taken? he bellowed. He pointed to the flame perched on the mother’s shoulder, which he could not brush away no matter how hard he tried. Watch out with that thing! Cecil Peter said. The mother looked around her. For now, though Cecil Peter carried on like mad, all seemed calm and bright.

  EVEN THOUGH THE winds were all around, and near her ankles little vortices whirled, the mother went in search of a piano for the child. There was a simplicity and directness to the task that she liked very much. It was obvious to the mother that if you didn’t learn to play the piano, your life would be less complete and your world diminished. She closed her eyes and began to envision the piano. She did not worry so much about its elegiac qualities: the dark mahogany or the ivory. Besides, hardly any keys were made of ivory anymore.

  Before long, a piano became available in the town of Kinderhook, and the mother made her way to it. When the woman with the piano opened the door and saw the mother, it was as if she knew her, and she hurried her into the drawing room with scarcely a word. Drawing room is short for withdrawing room, and it was a place where ladies once went after dinner while the men retired elsewhere. In the drawing room, the woman played the nocturne now.

  Later she explained that she had had a son once who loved the piano, but that he had lost his hands in the war. The keys had been refurbished with his finger bones, which the war had sent home in a box. His wedding ring was kept in a saucer on the piano top. The mother braced herself for the rest of the story, which had been foretold in the nocturne.

  Eventually, the woman said, a world where her son could not play the piano became a world impossible for him to live in, and he left this life.

  She began again to play.

  A keyboard of bone makes a sound like no other.

  IN THE AGE of Funnels, the Vortex Man ruled, and the mother felt a certain awe when she thought of him there at the center of the whirling world. Though she could not exactly see him, she liked to think of him as a large fellow, wearing a crown and seated on a throne at the core of the Vortex. Conversant with danger and the depths, but a ballast, nonetheless, a guide in dizzying times.

  No matter what wind whipped around them, or what the spinning suggested, the Vortex Man remained calm, fixed, solid, jolly even. Such was the mystery of the Vortex, that while all whirled with unfathomable energy, at the center it was still and mild.

  She loved him: part wizard, part professor, choreographer, director, smoke artist, misanthrope, a monster, some said. Now the mother was hearing things: Destroyed will be our remembrance from the earth, he bellowed. It was night. Hello, she called, but who could hear her?

  Sometimes, she thought his face must seem patient, impassive, serene, in waiting. Sometimes she imagined it as condescending, bemused, intolerant, or worse. Other times, it was possible to see strength and wisdom. More and more, people attempted to make their way to him through high winds and treacherous terrain, braving tornadoes, hurricanes, sunspots, cyclones, black holes, and even ether, the fifth element, to be by his side.

  NOW BEFORE HER in the seductive wind-ridden night, the wolf stood in dazzling moonlight. Its silver fur, its sleek, streamlined body. Its snout. The glowing head. If it was an apparition, it was a sly one—and masqueraded as real, and suggested only solidity and magnificence. There was an unearthly quiet. She stood in a thicket of emotion, blinded by its beauty. Something wild moved through her and she shuddered. She remembered when it had turned her long ago from a child into a woman overnight and carried her over the threshold. The wolf darted away now. If the child had been present, she might have named it Jet.

  How remarkable is the world, and all its creatures, and the magnitude of the feeling. The force of arrival, and the force of departure. And the way the space, made radiant by the wolf, retained something of that charged, majestic quality, long after the wolf had passed.

  8

  conflagrations

  THE NIGHT OIL Man came to check the propane tanks and hoses and lines that ran into the house because the mother was certain the house was about to explode. The Night Oil Man had claws that were black from oil and curved. He was muttering because it was the center of the night and bitter cold, and though he was on call, he clearly had other places to trundle toward at that hour. The child remained asleep in her little firebed, and the mother saw no use in waking her. In the flammable world, it was better for the child not to move a muscle, and if she was awake, she might toss Lamby into the air and they might go up in the conflagration. Earlier, the mother had moved the child’s bed with the child and the lamb outside onto the grass under the stars into the garden. If the child woke up she would be scared, but it was better than being blown to smithereens, the mother reasoned.

  When the Night Oil Man returned from his inspection, he was angry, for he found nothing at all that might have signaled trouble, no cause whatsoever for alarm, and no reason to justify his being taken away from the thick of his Night Oil wife and the night.

  At that moment, he might have strangled the mother or violated her in some unspeakable way, at the very least, were it not for the child whom he saw all of a sudden outside asleep in the little makeshift trundle bed under the stars. Seeing her from the corner of his half-closed, blackened eye, he hunched over her, and cinders dropped from his hair. Instead of squatting above the mother with his night oil grunts, the house exploding around them, he smiled at the child and the lamb neatly tucked in.

  At this time, no mention was made of the smell—not the smell of the Night Oil Man, nor the smell of the child. The child was wearing an amulet containing the aromatic Oil of Wintergreen, an oil known in the Valley for warding off bats.

  The Night Oil Man patted the child on the head, sneered at the mother, and made his way back into the night.

  Before he left, the mother pressed a spare amulet into his hand. Despite the reassurances of the Night Oil Man, the mother put up her umbrella and held vigil all night at the mouth of the house, and waited for day to come.

  A SMART BOMB was falling directly at her, but she was smarter, and she caught it and she held it in her arms and she rocked it and soothed it, until it was detonated and rendered harmless. The mother appeared meek and mild on the outside, but she was fierce an
d brave inside. She wrapped the bomb in swaddling clothes: her eyeless, soulless, inanimate child—so that another child might live.

  IT WAS JULY, and the Headless Horseman Fife and Drum Corps was making its way across the sheepfold. The children were Grinning for Cheese and playing Hoops and the Game of Graces. It was a splendor to watch them on the lawn with their circles and ribbons and slender sticks, and the gaiety and laughter delighted the mother. On the Croquet Lawn, a Punch and Judy show was being staged. Chimneyside Tales were being told. There were games of Shuttlecock and Nine Pins. Bells rang. Some who came were walking on stilts. Others were spitting cherry pits, trying to go the distance. Little children were making dolls of cornhusks. The child sat next to the loom with her lamb. On the Bleaching Field, skirmishes between the Redcoats and the Patriots were being reenacted. At noon the Freedom Pole was raised, and at four the effigy of King George was strung up and hanged. The boys beat it soundly with sticks.

  Effigies in fact abounded in the Valley. It was a valley of fewer and fewer men, and more and more, the women and children were asked to chase figments out on the memory field.

  After the last tale was told, the mother noticed that there was some small calamity occurring in the bushes, and she rose to see what the commotion was. It was not enough apparently that King George had been strung up and hanged and beaten. Seven small boys had dragged the entrails of the King furtively into a wooded enclosure and were huddled around it. In the enclave, the boys were beating and battering the very daylights out of what remained with sticks.

  In their fervor, they did not notice the mother. One boy who had been appointed Guard, so as to ensure no one came to take away their cache, had gotten caught up in the enthusiasm of the moment and had deserted his post.

  The mother, as she got nearer, felt as if she were seeing through a veil something of the shrouded part of humanity, something at the very heart of life’s darkness. Mysterious are the days. Not far away, a small faceless cornhusk doll reached for day, or her mother, now a husk as well.

  The boys bent over the wreckage and worked at it with unbounded passion until even the entrails of King George were no more. The mother knew that soon enough, the boys too would be gone without a trace.

  NEWS TRAVELED FAST of the teenager’s drowning in the Palatine Lake at the edge of the village. No one knew why a healthy young man on a clear summer day should have drowned in a lake.

  Hundreds of years before, the Palatines had come to this place to build boats, but they discovered that the wood was too heavy and their boats would not float.

  The Great-Grandfathers in the Valley recalled the ice harvests. Next winter, a church will be built on the ice at the very place the boy bobbed up, and all will lift a crystal glass to him. The boy will not come back. He sank—no one knows why—like the Palatine’s wood.

  Wunderbar, the Palatines will exclaim, looking at the magnificent glittering monument to their drowned son, but after that, an irrepressible gloom will enter them, and their hearts will grow heavy and sink. They had not realized how much they missed the Rhine.

  Come summer, the palace melted, they will wish they too could go home, but there is no way back. The lake where the boy drowned will seem to have closed up around him, but that is not exactly the case. The water will retain the information of the boy’s body for a long, long time. And next to that memory, the people will stay.

  THE ASTRONOMERS FOUND a new planet; it was situated in the Goldilocks Zone, they said. The Goldilocks Zone is a small, hospitable zone of possibility in the vast burning and freezing cosmos where life might actually be sustained. It is not too cold there; it is not too hot—it is just right.

  The astronomers could barely contain their excitement for their new planet, and they named it Gliese, which sounded to the child like glissade, and she dreamt of water, the origin of life, and rock, and sandy beach, and a thousand streaming living organisms.

  Water is so important—we can’t survive without it, even for a few days. The mother thought of the world of thirst, and the work of human hands, and the miracle of water and desire.

  THE CHILD DREAMT of a beautiful lake, and the mother dreamt right along with her. It’s very blue and deep, the child said. It’s fed by warm and cool springs. At night it is as smooth as silk, and no bats skim the surface.

  There is a beach, and on the beach there are many children, and they always invite the child to play the circle game, or the game where they would say again and again the name of Marco Polo, the Venetian explorer who traveled the Silk Road.

  The mother kept the child tethered to her by a silk strand of the most remarkable resiliency. There was a special gland in the mother’s abdomen. The silk the mother produced was not only flexible, but it stretched to accommodate the farthest places the child would ever want to go. It was extremely durable, and as long as the child was alive, it would be there for her: smooth and strong, and with a lot of give.

  Every night the child would spend a few seconds of dreamtime sharpening her teeth in preparation for the day when the silk tether would have to be severed. Only at the very end of the child’s life would her teeth be sharp enough to break it, and by then it would be almost painless. For now, the mother reeled the child in, but gently, almost imperceptibly.

  Marco Polo traveled the Silk Road and reached farther than any of his predecessors—venturing even beyond Mongolia into China. He passed through Armenia, Persia, and Afghanistan over the Pamirs and all along the Silk Road to China. He was the first traveler to trace a route across the whole longitude of Asia, naming and describing kingdom after kingdom.

  The airport in Venice was named after Marco Polo, and one day, after the mother had died, the child would go there. On the outskirts of Venice is the Lago di Garda. It is said to be one of the most beautiful lakes in the world.

  GLIESE’S STAR WAS cooler and smaller than the earth’s sun, but it was also much closer. A year passed there in thirteen days. In the paper there was a drawing of a child standing on Gliese, and behind the child was an enormous sun setting. It is only 120 trillion miles away, the astronomers say, which is not really so far.

  THE ANGELS OF Death flew over the boy’s head. Three girls with their backpacks sat near his bed and took turns holding his hand. Surely, surely, he thought, if there was anyone out there, he would have heard, and it was by far the worst part of his short time on the planet that he had not made contact with those in other galaxies. Yes, he was only nine, and perhaps he would if he could only live a little bit longer. A number of distant civilizations could have developed and perished while flooding the cosmos with signals which have long since passed, or will never arrive in time.

  Give me a sign, the boy says, and waits—and in the distance Gliese shines.

  SEVEN ASTRONAUTS SLIPPED into unconsciousness—so said the report, and their bodies were whipped around in seats whose restraints had failed. The astronauts had continued to work as parts of the shuttle, including its wings, were falling off. Multiple failures of the smallest and largest sort had been set into motion. Helmets meant to protect them battered their skulls, but neither helmets nor spacesuits mattered in the end, for the crew had been subjected to five separate lethal events.

  The breakup of the module and the crew’s subsequent exposure to hypersonic entry conditions were not survivable. The mother thought of that word, “survivable,” for a long time, and it filled her with awe.

  Yes, the Gliese dreaming boy thought, there would be winds, shock waves, and other extreme conditions in the upper atmosphere. The craft went on a nauseating flat spin. Surely, the boy thought, the loss of cabin pressure had asphyxiated them within seconds.

  THE PRODIGIOUS PUPPET-GOD and his Puppet Circus had come with its radical Utopian Vision in cardboard and cloth. There would be workshops, the poster said. At the workshops one might learn how to make effigies, father figures, giants for rallies, table heads for families, etc. Their mission: International Understanding through the Art of Puppetry. Their se
cond mission: to honor all the disappearance when and where it occurred with small puppet actions. Tonight the Divine Reality Comedy was scheduled—and next week, the Everyday Domestic Resurrection Pageant. A smattering of applause could already be heard.

  THE MOTHER BAKED an Appreciation Cake for Cecil Peter and his wife Wise Jean, who had saved the house once more, snuffing the flaming Swedish candelabra in the hall that she had left burning brightly while she went to the art exhibit at the child’s school.

  The child had done a drawing of an angel and had wrapped it in red cellophane, and in a certain light, it looked to the mother as if the angel were catching fire.

  Angels can be weird, the child wrote under her picture, but they have beauty inside.

  The mother did not particularly like to bake, but the cake for Cecil Peter and Wise Jean turned out to be exceptional. It took up the entire kitchen, having risen so high and grown so large, she told the child, because it had been made in gratitude, and its enormity surprised even the mother who, whenever possible, tried to keep her emotions in check. It grew so large that by the time Cecil Peter and Wise Jean and all their relations arrived, they had to cut themselves an entrance out of cake to get in, and all then understood well the importance of Cecil Peter and Wise Jean to the mother, for there is something definitive about an entrance made of cake.

  The mother hugged Cecil Peter’s wife Wise Jean, who, having dozed off in her chair, had seen the fire in a dream. When she woke, startled, she whispered to Cecil Peter to check on the house up the hill right away. Wise Jean, who was a volunteer firefighter, was blessed with extra vision, and Cecil Peter, who could always be counted on, nodded and was there in a flash.

  Come let us dance, for time is short! The mother sang, and the child played the bone piano and the family danced like dervishes, and the house stood in all its glory, securely on the far side of the char.