Mother and Child Page 9

  IN ROOM 13 a man had been diagnosed with a condition characterized by periods of irresistible sleep, and more and more, the irresistible sleep overcomes the man. Sleep-induced paralysis makes it impossible for him to move. Frozen, he awaits reanimation. Sometimes the man is not 100 percent asleep, but somewhere in between. Strong emotion makes the man’s body go still—they call it the Stillness—and at this time, he is both somewhat awake and somewhat asleep.

  The part of the man’s brain that maintains wakefulness is now being stimulated in the room adjacent to where another man is shrinking into a boy. When the legs turn blue, she will know it is almost over for him. The mother tries calling her friend the Blue Man now in an attempt to prepare herself.

  Around almost every corner whole lives, hanging in abeyance, await transformation.

  A powerful sedative known as the date elixir is being administered to the man in Room 13. Among daters it is known to cause dates to become drowsy and consent to a variety of acts they might not otherwise.

  For reasons unknown, the date elixir seems to revive the man in Room 13, which is the exact reverse of what it does for the dates. Beside him, in the chamber, a herd of anesthetized women slumber, but not the formerly sleeping man, who steps blithely, no one knows why, over them.

  The mother has heard that in the case of the Seven Sleeping Sisters, seven single-cell parasites entered their bodies, and when these bodies encountered the Sleeping Sickness parasites, the single sleeping cells would change shape, and then change shape again, so they were in disguise and the sisters’ bodies could never recognize them. The Seven Sleeping Sisters slept soundly now in the Spiegelpalais, along with the dreamers in the Blue Ward, where those who are blue due to the smoke inhalation are kept.

  As the mother has always maintained, there are any number of miracles that have always happened, are happening now, and will continue to happen in the hospital. It was what drew her to it in the first place.

  THE CHILD HAD wandered up to the Dementia Unit where Oscar the Death Cat, who had the uncanny ability to predict the exact moment of death, was said to roam. The dying, right before death, turn a bluish color, the child had heard. Oscar is never wrong, the nurses say, as they make their rounds. The child follows Oscar as he passes those with days to live and moves to the one with only hours, drawn to the imminence. He arrives a few hours before death; he leaves a few minutes after.

  Never underestimate the power of cats. They are tuned permanently to Alpha, the psychic station—divination is their gift; witches love them. The metabolism as it changes has an unmistakable aura. Who knows what Oscar gleans from the dying? Perhaps he assumes the soul into his corporeal being for comfort. Perhaps he is the barge from one shore to the next. Those who can no longer move open their arms, miraculously. Stop here, they implore. Those, too far gone to speak, somehow manage to say, stay with me, with utter clarity. Oscar, Oscar don’t pass me by again today, the woman begs in a direct address. And yes, the child notices, her legs do seem to have a bluish tinge.

  SHE TRIED TO breathe. Many times she had stood high up and looked out, atop those tall windy towers. A window on the world—she gasped for air. Cecil Peter said not to worry—it was only the Blue Madness passing through her.

  13

  tooth

  LOOK HOW BLUE, the Bay of Fundy! The Grandmother from the North Pole tells the child that the Bay of Fundy is an extremely beautiful and environmentally fragile part of the coastline, and she brings it up on the screen. There, the Grandmother from the North Pole says, she has seen whales. Only four hundred right whales exist in the Northern Hemisphere, and that is where they congregate and she counts them.

  Once, blue whales filled every ocean on earth, the Grandmother laments. Now there are only a few, and she awaits their blue visitation. They are so enormous that when they come, she will see them easily from her outpost at the North Pole.

  Whales sing above the frequency of the human threshold for sound. Their song moves through the speed of water four times faster than in air. Yes Sven, once blue whales filled every ocean on earth. Now she puts her ear to the emptied ocean. A melancholy sound, a dirge can be heard if nothing else.

  Uncle Sven tried his whole life to catch a whale to no avail. All his life he held 180 decibels next to his puny chest. What can withstand the navy’s sonar? Uncle Sven reasoned from his infinitesimal ship. He tried to make a noise that would stop the whale—Little Sven, you know better. All his life he tried. Sven, his one small soul suspended, laments. The muting effects of water. Little Sven, the Grandmother from the North Pole says, you know so much better than that.

  The blue whale can accurately map the soul, though the soul of the sea is out of reach. Sven turns on his little sonar. It has been said that a blue whale can build in its mind’s eye a picture of the entire ocean simply by sending out a sound and registering its echo.

  The Grandmother from the North Pole knows that the blue whales killed by whalers can never be weighed whole. The heart alone is over a thousand pounds. Extracted, it sings above the human threshold.

  A BLUE MULTITUDE of children just back from the ocean huddle around the mother—Lars, Bibi, Ingmar, Anders, Sven, and baby Inga—and she sings to them a whale song and pats their heads.

  It is believed to be the largest animal ever to have lived.

  THE MOTHER THOUGHT it was one of the great unspoken strangenesses—the inaccessibility of the present—where the child ran toward her on the green grass. So coltish, that day on the lawn. The image indelible, but also vulnerable and porous, permeable, open to bruising or injury. And a medium girl here now, and at the same time a baby in her carriage under the same tree and a toddler toddling on the green grass and a teenager, suddenly sullen, and a grown woman now walking toward her mother who has not aged.

  Everything was fluid, nothing was fixed, nothing was in the moment, in the instant—or by the time the instant was upon her, as it approached without notice, it was already gone, had in fact serenely passed by without pause or fanfare. How incidental and how momentous at the same time.

  On the Aging Stage the child is a toddler, or the mother is a child, and the Grandmother from the North Pole is young again. Only to die. Even the future seems in memorial, taking on an eerie burnished quality as if it has already passed. Every moment frays and unravels. The child’s child running in the grass. The mother picks her up, but already her skull is covered with moss.

  These errant visions. This striving on the Aging Stage after multiple girls in the grass, the Easter egg hunt, the croquet on the lawn, the time of the Communion, or the day not yet here, when the violinist will show up and open his case, shaped like a little lady, and play. Or the soft sutures, furrowing suddenly the grass where they will lay Bunny Boy to rest one day.

  NOT SO FAST, Bunny Boy says. The concrete rabbit in purple garments plays a herald horn. Not quite so fast.

  TO TAKE THE heart out and fix it, they had to break the child’s sternum. The heart taken from Uncle Lars floated above the mother’s head like a red balloon, and she followed it for the duration of the surgery, wherever it led her. She was just a girl, and she wandered over hill and vale and grassy slope.

  How nice to see you, Mr. Min! What are you doing here? He too has been following the red balloon, he says, along with his son. But the mother must have gotten confused, for no Mr. Min was with Uncle Lars then when he was a boy in Minnesota, and Uncle Lars was all grown, and his heart had been put back a long time ago now.

  HUMAN BREATH IS pressed through the valve—the origin of music. My Darkling, the mother whispers, petting the child’s head. Tears and seawater wash the valve clean.

  BUT WHAT IF time was all around them and they were swimming immersed in it? What if the past hadn’t vanished and the future didn’t eradicate? And it swirled everywhere around them?

  The Vortex Man lifted his head and seemed to smile.

  What if Oblivion did not pull at them, did not summon them; what if it just stayed in its place,
somewhere offstage, or waited in the wings of Uncle Ingmar’s shadow theater a little while longer?

  UNCLE INGMAR PHONED to say that the other Ingmar—the great filmmaker—had died, and with that, a small essential light in Uncle Ingmar went out forever. He felt he was the director’s invention, the director’s confection, and now Uncle Ingmar wondered what was left for him. Film was more solid, Uncle Ingmar always said, and reality more remote.

  A part of Uncle Ingmar was disappearing now, unable to sustain himself without the other Ingmar. And most fittingly, with that, Uncle Ingmar’s cell phone connection went dead. The mother was not concerned, for she knew Uncle Ingmar would turn up like every year—with the snow.

  CECIL PETER SAID that the Age of Funnels always brought madness when it returned, and this time would be no exception. In the pastures the mad cows lowed, and in the rafters the bats chittered, and on the horizon the vanishing men increasingly lost their way and their teeth, and the women, dizzy, swooned a little, and small vortices followed them wherever they went.

  The child too was losing teeth. The Toothless Wonder worked hard trying to get the teeth from the mouth of the child, but the mother no longer opened the door. The mother recalls when the child lost her first tooth, and that for a long time she carried it around with her everywhere in her pocket. It was something wonderful to hold: smooth and sure and white—a trinket extracted from the great whirling of time, which spun around her. In the increasingly remote place the mother inhabited, she could carry a tooth, and it served as a souvenir and a talisman and a way through.

  More and more the mother found herself in an interim place. She could not get herself to cross over, but neither could she go back. On such days, the tooth was just the thing.

  EVERYWHERE THE MOTHER went, she carried the first tooth in her pocket, but one day when she went to feel for it, the first tooth was gone. She was certain she had had it still in the blustery garden, and in the root cellar, and in the smokehouse, so she must have dropped it, she reasoned, in the parking lot of the Stop & Shop.

  At night the mother went out into the supermarket parking lot and divided it methodically into quadrants, then took out her broom and carefully began to sweep, the child all the while asleep in her car seat.

  The anguished mother, night after night, lights the lamp, sweeps the macadam, and weeps. Never again, she vows, shall she take a tooth, detached from the child’s head, out to the Super Stop & Shop.

  IN THE BLUE Park, the Children of the Spectrum feared the sliding pond. They did not care that a box of sparkle awaited them at the bottom. Heights frightened them. The laws of gravity frightened them. They traversed an arc, a continuum that moved from cautious to more cautious to most cautious, from less fearful, to mildly fearful, to paralyzed with fear. Fear of the sliding pond can be attributed to the abnormality in chromosome 15, some members of the community speculate. Yes, and there is always the possibility of Fragile X Syndrome, the mother says.

  Take care when walking between the frogs after the rain in spring. Take care when holding the too-soft hand of your grandmother. The Children of the Spectrum moved along a trajectory of carefulness. The mother thought it wouldn’t hurt for more children to be more cautious and less careless in all things.

  Blue, removed, fearful of the sliding pond, the child didn’t mind; the child liked the Children of the Spectrum. She did not want to give them the Horse Cure or the Smiling Cure or the Chess Cure like others did. She would sit, if they came, a long time by their sides.

  14

  IN THE FACE of the Blue Madness, she thought of the mother she might have turned out to be in the great Midwest with an apron full of palm-of-the-hand babies and wee ones, and how when the funnels came up, she would just stand there with the whole clan until the very last moment. The funnel would be coming right toward them, and she’d open the trapdoor every time with only seconds to spare.

  Despite the child and all the palm-of-the-hand babies, of which there are many, the mother’s solitude is cosmic: a force field, and everything is engulfed by it. She was hypnotized by the funnels, she’d say—all that swirling, and she would tilt the babies’ heads toward the green light, and she would hold the child’s hand tightly.

  In the face of the whirling world, the mother, with resolve, thought maybe they could tack a few things down, or make categories, or make lists in order to better manage the chaos and the solitude, which were mounting, and this the child approved of, and the mother felt soothed. She closed her eyes and behind them a wall of rain began to fall.

  Tears

  The mother recalls the magnetic water city—but whether she had produced it with her tears, or it had produced her, she could not say for sure. For the weeks she was there, she never stopped weeping. She recalls water flooding the streets, water turning the girls round and round—and those extravagant fountains. If the insatiable city had produced her, a weeping woman, in a place reliant on weeping for its existence, so be it.

  She thought of the painter Titian, and she thought of the painter Tintoretto, and she thought of the Lago di Garda. Perhaps she was part of a larger design she would never see or understand.

  All she knew was that she shimmered.

  Some days, the mother had the distinct feeling that she had been painted into this ravishing scene, thousands of years earlier, where she had been left to wait. Only today, in the small library, when the child turns the large beautiful pages of the art book, running her hand over the painting, and murmuring says, look! does the mother come to life.

  Look!

  The people who had assembled in the meadow gasped. The very letters that spelled Spiegelpalais above the mirrored tent seemed to have caught fire. The children climbed the fire truck’s ladder, rung by rung by rung.

  At Last the Shark

  At last the shark, suspended in a vitrine of formaldehyde, had arrived. It had made its way from across the ocean to the Valley and would remain at the Spiegelpalais for an undisclosed period of time. Many who flocked to the verdant Valley in summer came to view the shark suspended in liquid.

  When you visit the shark, the paper had advised, visit it with an open mind. It was meant to be viewed as a work of art, and it was titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. The mother and child walked gingerly into the tent. A blue light filled them. In the large tank, nothing moved. The child pressed her hand to the place of the shark’s mouth.

  Everything in the world is a substitute for every other thing in the world. Today the mother was quite certain that whatever had once happened to her, whatever she had survived, whatever had brought her here to the Valley, whatever allowed for this—the Spiegelpalais, the child’s hand in hers, the other hand of the child in the shark’s mouth, the shark suspended in its glass case—she was inordinately lucky. Like the shark, she was floating too, outside time, outside space, at the mercy of a merciful universe.

  The child thought this was by far the best art show she had ever been to.

  A human skull encrusted with diamonds was promised at the Spiegelpalais next.

  Next

  At the edge of the meadow, a battalion of small children carry a heavy fire hose and put out the fire that has unexpectedly begun in the left ventricle.

  Divinity Basket

  She wanted to order the man who was her friend a Divinity Basket, with flowers as white as the resurrection, but in all the Valley, there were no white flowers to be had.

  Since when are there no white flowers in summer? she wanted to ask the florist on the phone. Since when is a town bereft of flowers in summer? Summer, he says, and even though he is a small businessman, his voice drifts, and he says summer as if it is a question. Yes it is summer, the mother states plainly.

  All of the flowers the town possessed within its borders had already been used up on the man who had once shown her the drawing of the gallbladder, the florist tells her.

  Now the season will not hold. The path she walks slips back into winter. Lik
e those moving paths in the airport, she now seemed to be moving without taking a single step, toward the funeral home, a place she does not want to go in such a hurry. She worried that cold and flowerless, she would arrive too quickly now to her destination. With or without flowers, the family must arrive to greet the body first.

  Standing outside in the chill, the mother thought maybe they should all let up on the flowers a little. Maybe he will suffocate under so many flowers. In the end he was as thin and light as a harp, and perhaps not able to withstand the weight of so many flowers. Had anyone thought of that?

  Blind

  Before she went blind at the Spiegelpalais, the artist had spent a good deal of time scouring the Valley, traversing both the hills and vales in search of a cardinal that had met its end. It was against the law to shoot or otherwise harm a songbird of any sort for any reason in the Valley, and as a result, each day the artist’s search had grown more and more desperate, as a cardinal was imperative to her next work of art. Though she had ordered hundreds of artificial cardinals over the Internet, not a single one of those cardinals as it turned out would do. She put out an announcement: if anyone in the Valley happens to find a dead cardinal on the path, et cetera.

  Awhile back, Jean Audubon, having captured a Golden Eagle, tried to smoke it to death by setting a coal fire under it and putting it in a closet and covering it with a blanket, but four hours later when he checked, what he saw was an eagle glaring back at him, bonjour! The next day, he added sulfur to the rekindled fire, and still after many more hours, a glaring, living bird greeted him. Finally he had to resort to five stilettos through the heart, all the while being careful not to ruffle too many feathers.